15 June 2022

rophet row sparks cyber war: Malaysia’s DragonForce hacks corporate VPNs, websites of Mumbai varsity, Thane police

AIHIK SUR

The Malaysia-based DragonForceIO continued attacking Indian websites on June 14 in response to comments against Prophet Mohammad, with the “hacktivist group” announcing attacks on two Indian corporate VPNs and websites of Mumbai University and Thane city police.

As part of the OpsPatuk campaign, wherein DragonForceIO called on hackers across the world to target Indian government websites, hackers claimed breaking into Cybernetyx VPN and Logixal VPNs. Cybersecurity company CloudSEK confirmed to Moneycontrol that the VPNs were hacked into.

The hackers also shared login credentials with designated IP addresses associated with the two corporate VPNs. Apart from that, the hackers also shared screenshots in supports of their claims.

CloudSEK told Moneycontrol that Logixal is an Oracle banking service provider used by major banks in the country, and Cybernetyx provides services to edtech companies.

Logixal and Cybernetyx were yet to respond to Moneycontrol’s queries. The copy will be updated to reflect their response.

The government, through the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, has issued new cybersecurity guidelines that would mandate service providers, including VPNs, to store customer details, IP addresses allotted and other information for a specific period. However, in a clarification provided later by CERT-In, it had said that the directions will not apply to corporate VPNs.

Apart from that, hackers also said they had conducted a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack on the official website of Mumbai University.

In a DDOS attack, the attacker floods a server with internet traffic to prevent users from accessing online services and sites, the report added.

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