Cochin International Airport Limited (CIAL) was among the five airports to come under a denial of service attack by a hacker group named Anonymous Sudan on Saturday.
The group is a bunch of politically motivated hackers from Sudan known to target critical infrastructure. The other airports to come under attack were the ones in Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Goa.
CIAL’s website was targeted by the group by jacking up traffic thus leading to denial of service. The web portal went down around 5 p.m. Normal service was restored around 10 p.m.
“Websites with web application firewalls would be able to fend off such attacks as the Delhi and Hyderabad airports managed to. Such attacks could affect the airport’s operations as well if the other services are also on the same server,” said a cyber security expert.
On Friday, the group had through a social media post warned that India would be the next target, and that attacks were likely to continue till April 14, according to the noise in Dark Web.
Anonymous Suda is a known ‘hactivist’ group that engages in religious activism in the Internet. The group had aligned with a Russian hacker group and targeted allies of Ukraine in the ongoing war between the two nations. Besides, it also attacked countries like India and Israel, which, it believed, were guilty of persecution of minorities.
“The reason for our attack on India is what they are doing with the Muslims, and we will start our attacks on India within the next hour,” warned the group just ahead of the attack.
“We are experiencing an unprecedented traffic in our website making it inaccessible. It has, however, not affected our operations. We follow the standard security protocol, and our IT wing is on it to resolve the problem,” said an airport spokesperson.
