How A Cyber Storm That Tried To Cripple India's Top Offices During Op Sindoor Was Crushed

News18

6 hours ago

Last Updated:
The cyber onslaught, aimed at overwhelming and crashing India's top digital infrastructure, primarily originated from China, Pakistan and some other areas located in the Gulf
The websites of a top Indian constitutional office faced over a 100-fold surge in DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks during the recent conflict between India and Pakistan, with the cyber-attacks being primarily traced to some regions of China and Pakistan, News18 has learnt.
MeitY (Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology), along with other agencies, formed special teams and swiftly deployed advanced cyber-defence systems to neutralise the threat in real time to make the websites functional.
According to sources in the government, the cyber onslaught, aimed at overwhelming and crashing India's top digital infrastructure, primarily originated from China, Pakistan and some other areas located in the Gulf. Such activities triggered a high alert across agencies, leading to the deployment of MeitY's advanced cyber-defence systems, equipped with next-gen firewalls and real-time threat neutralisation protocols.
A senior officer, who is part of the special team, told News18: 'The attack was not just significant in scale but also in intent and timing. The attacks were strategically launched to disrupt critical digital infrastructure amid a high-stakes national security operation."
Top cyber-intelligence sources added that the flood of fake traffic originated predominantly from two geopolitical hotspots. Both neighbouring regions were identified as the primary source of botnet-driven requests that targeted sites in an attempt to render them inaccessible to legitimate users. 'These were not isolated pings. The attack was persistent, coordinated, and sustained over several days," the officer added.
The DDoS attack functions by overwhelming a server, website, or the network with a relentless stream of requests until the system is slowed down, or becomes unresponsive, and in the process, crashes entirely. In this case, the intensity of the attack forced the government's cyber security agencies and MeitY to deploy its cutting-edge defensive cyber protocol, activating high-grade firewall barricades and AI-enabled threat filters to neutralise incoming malicious traffic.
'Attack vectors were identified, analysed and isolated systematically. What could have been a full-blown digital blackout was prevented by swift deployment of our real-time cyber shield," a senior cyber official confirmed.
Sources also revealed that India's National Critical Information Infrastructure Protection Centre (NCIIPC) was alerted, and counter-intrusion strategies were put in motion immediately after unusual traffic patterns were flagged. The PMO servers, fortified under Level-5 digital protection protocols, held steady due to rapid mitigation steps—but the scale of the attack has raised serious concerns about state-backed cyber warfare tactics being employed to coincide with India's internal security operations.
This marks one of the most coordinated digital offensives targeting a top-level Indian government site in recent months. The timing—coinciding with Operation Sindoor's execution phase—is not viewed as a coincidence by officials. India's cyber agencies are now in the process of tracing the botnet networks, identifying compromised global nodes, and mapping the larger architecture of hostile cyber command centres. Preliminary indicators suggest that this was more than just digital mischief—it was a strategic attempt to distract, disrupt, and disable.
First Published:
June 24, 2025, 10:16 IST