Thousands complain of slow internet as ISPs across Maharashtra reel under ‘massive’ attack
Picture Courtesy – Epictimes
If you have recently complained to your Internet Service Provider (ISP) about ‘slow internet’, chances are your ISP was unable to provide you a fix. But before you start thinking about switching providers, you should know that a majority of ISPs in the state are under attack since last Monday.
After thousands of internet users complained of slower browsing speeds, with pages and videos taking forever to load, an Andheri-based ISP filed a complaint against the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on Saturday. The FIR, filed by director of Syscon Infoway, Nikunj Kampani, is the first complaint against a DDos attack filed with the cyber police station at BKC.
Based on the complaint, a case against the unidentified accused has been registered under sections 43 (F) and 66 of the Information Technology Act.
After investigation, cyber police say that the attack is among the biggest they’ve seen and definitely the largest in India. ISPs from multiple cities like Mumbai, Thane and Pune have been affected by of the attack.
Cyber Police IG, Brijesh Singh said that big ISPs are able to mitigate the attack to an extent and continue operations. However, the smaller ISPs are witnessing the attack on an unprecedented scale, causing major disruptions in service. “We have registered an FIR and started tracking down the operators who are trying to crash the servers or ports of ISPs,” he said, adding that the attack has slowed down the internet services and affected subscribers of ISPs.
The attack was reportedly being executed at 200 gigabytes per second with the aid of several million compromised IP addresses.
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.”
As of Monday morning, small and medium ISPs are still struggling to provide uninterrupted service to users.
What is DDos attack?
In computing, a denial-of-service (DoS) attack is an attempt to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users, such as to temporarily or indefinitely interrupt or suspend services of a host connected to the Internet. A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) is where the attack source is more than one, often thousands of, unique and compromised IP addresses.
Typically, DDoS attacks are targeted at big websites or platforms with the intention of taking them down or blocking access to them. However, when an attack is targeted at ISPs, it severely affects user’s ability to access the internet via the ISP.
