Small and medium Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the state are under attack on an unprecedented scale, leading to their subscribers being affected, police sources told The Hindu on Friday.

The attack, known as a Distributed Denial Of Service (DDOS), involves facilitating a surge in activity of the target server at a very high speed. In a DDOS attack, a miscreant can programme multiple Internet Protocol (IP) addresses to log on to a server at the same time, causing the server to crash due to the load.

Explaining a DDOS attack, a police officer said, “If a particular server is equipped to handle 100 users at a time, a DDOS attack will create 1,000 log-ins at one time. This can be done by simply pre-programming 1,000 IP addresses to hack into and log on to the server at the specified time.”

Another officer, who is part of the investigation, said, “What makes this attack all the more serious is that the culprits are targeting ISPs who have commercial entities as subscribers. According to our information, this DDOS attack is being carried out at a dizzying speed of 200 gigabytes (GB) per second, and small and medium ISPs who do not have the infrastructure to ward off such attacks are being targeted.”

The Cyber Crime branch of the Maharashtra police received information that the DDOS attack has been on since Monday, after which it began contacting affected parties, asking them to share information on the attack. The police have appealed to affected parties to contact them atig.cbr-mah@gov.inorsp.cbr-mah@gov.in

IGP (Cyber Crime) Brijesh Singh confirmed a DDOS attack had been detected and was being looked into.

This attack is being carried out at 200 gigabytes (GB) per second, and ISPs who aren't protected against such attacks

are affected

A police officer