Thousands of Indian sites targeted by the Ganosec Team

A group of religion-motivated hacktivists, Ganosec Team or Hacktivist Indonesia, claimed to target about 12,000 Indian websites as per their recent announcement on their Telegram channel in a massive breach of website security. Based on the analysis of the Ganosec Team’s uploaded TXT file, it consisted of a list of thousands of Indian sites owned by local, central government, and private organisations.

Aside from India, the hacktivist group has previously launched cyberattacks against other countries, including the US, Sweden, and Israel. Security researchers believe that religion-related sentiments that offend the group trigger all their cyberattack campaigns.

 

India’s Cybercrime Coordination Centre (14C) has issued an alert regarding threats from the Ganosec Team.

 

Reports reveal that the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (14C) has circulated an alert among all targeted websites in the country, especially those of government sites. As a response, the country said that all the Indian websites included in Ganosec Team’s list are updated and will be able to handle similar cybersecurity threats and narratives from malicious actors.

Cybersecurity experts from India’s Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) added that such cyberattack threats from malicious groups mainly intend to execute distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) campaigns against their targets. The flooding of traffic toward the targeted domains can slow down the sites or even shut them down, leading to operational disruption.

According to MHA, if such events occur over the targeted Indian websites, they must report it immediately to cybercrime[.]gov[.]in. MHA also underlines that alongside 14C, they are working towards curbing cybercrimes in the central agencies.

Last December, Ganosec Team also threatened India about a cyberattack involving a leak of documents that listed thousands of Indian phone numbers that totalled 82.3MB.

Although hauling the name ‘Hacktivist Indonesia,’ many security researchers presume that the members of this group are from Malaysia or a different Islamic country. The group has also referenced other prolific hacktivist groups in their past posts, including Anonymous Sudan and Dragon Force Malaysia – allowing researchers to consider their attribution among each other.