Police register FIR in DDOS attacks on ISPs

The Maharashtra police registered an FIR yesterday in connection with the Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack on Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the state.

According to the police, this was the first such FIR of the kind to be registered in the country. They added, the attack was still on.

According to investigators, millions of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses infected with a Trojan had been deployed in the attack.

Small and medium ISPs were being targeted in the DDOS attack, which police said had been carried out on a massive scale since Monday at a speed of 200 gigabytes per second.

The Cyber Crime department of the Maharashtra Police and the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team are jointly working to mitigate the attack and trace the source.

IGP (Cyber Crime) Brijesh Singh said, ''An FIR has been filed with the Cyber police station in BKC under sections 43 (F) and 66 of the Information Technology Act. We are investigating, '' The Hindu reported.

An officer with the investigating team told The Hindu, ''We have been mitigating the attack, blocking all the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses involved as soon as we identify them. The attack, however, still continues. The resources behind the attack have to be considerable. We are trying to trace the location from which the attack is being orchestrated.''

A DDoS attack makes a computer or a server slow down so that anyone who uses an ISP's services cannot get connected to the internet.

The tell tale sign of a DDoS attack is slowing down of the internet. Users face difficulty in opening websites, see a huge increase in spam and experience reduced or no access to services like email and net banking.

The Times of India quoted IG (cyber) Brijesh Singh as saying "Big service providers are tackling the attack. Small and medium ISPs are under attack on an unprecedented scale."