18-year-old, minor held for cyberterrorism targetting govt websites
An 18-year-old was arrested and a minor apprehended by the Gujarat Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) for alleged cyberterrorism and targetting government websites, officials said on Tuesday.
The ATS said that more than 50 websites of the Union and state governments were attacked between April and May 2025. On May 7 alone, the day Operation Sindoor was launched by the Indian Armed Forces against terrorist camps in Pakistan in response to a terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir's Pahalgam on April 22, at least 20 government websites were attacked by a Telegram group, which the accused were part of, said the ATS. One of the messages sent to the Telegram group on May 7, read, 'India May have started it but we will be the one to finish it.'
The two have been booked under Sections 43 (liability for damage to computer systems) and 66(f) (cyber terrorism) of the Information Technology Act.
The cyber unit of the ATS were trawling the darknet and conducting surveillance on anti-national activities when PI D B Prajapati were informed that one Jaseem Shahnawaz Ansari and a juvenile in conflict with law — who were part of a Telegram group called Anonsec — were allegedly trying to conduct Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks on various websites of the Government of India. In case of a DDoS attack, a system is flooded with malicious traffic.
Officials were also informed that the two accused would then document their attempts to 'take down' these websites and post it on the Telegram group allegedly along with 'messages against India'.
A team under DySP Virjitsinh Parmar made a diary note at ATS police station and detained both persons from Nadiad in Kheda district. Their phones were sent for analysis to the Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) in Gandhinagar. Once the information was confirmed by the FSL, an FIR was filed and both were questioned by ATS personnel, leading to alleged admission of cyberterrorism.
A statement from the ATS on Tuesday said that the accused persons had created an ID on the Telegram app in the name of @BYTEEXPLOIT and created a channel named EXPLOITXSEC. They used another ID to allegedly create a backup channel named ELITEXPLOIT and later changed its name to Anonsec.
The ATS said that the two accused had learned different programming languages and applications with the help of YouTube tutorials. They had allegedly downloaded tools to launch the DDoS attack from an website called GITHUB and then used these tools to target government websites. They would then post updates on the status of the attacked websites in the form of screenshots on their Telegram group.
Further investigation in the case is underway.
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