The official website of the Delhi Commonwealth Games, 2010 (www.cwgdelhi2010.org) was targeted heavily by the cyber attackers. There were around 5,000 such attacks in a period of 12 days and 1,000 out of them were potential attacks – this comes to more than three cyber attacks every hour. All the six networks running for CWG games were attacked. But India backed itself with a strong cyber security command room. There was a 3 layer security set up to stop any cyber attack on official site of CWG 2010.
The experts of the Cyber Crisis Management Group (CMG) did a commendable job and monitored the website networks round the clock. They mentioned that roughly three-fourths of these attempts to breach and paralyze the Games networks originated from China. Whereas, a group of attacks that took place between 3 and 5 October originated in Pakistan. Some attempts to penetrate CWG circuits were made from Mumbai as well, top sources in the CMG said.
The CMG, which operated from an out-of-bounds Cyber Command Centre set up on the seventh floor of the Games Organizing Committee (OC) headquarters, included cyber experts from the intelligence agencies, Delhi Police and the Government of India’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In). The credit for the success in cyber security also goes to team work of ECIL (Electronics Corporation of India Ltd), NTRO (National Technical Research Organization) and IB, as well to vendors like MTNL, and TCIL (Telecommunications Consultants India Ltd).
The six networks, including those of Games data, security, venues, Internet services and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd (MTNL), were linked to the Command Centre, which constantly monitored over 3,000 computers, 3,000 CCTVs and 1,800 network switches. Special software detected and mapped all “deviant behavior” on logs. The intensity of the attacks was so high that many times a day, the log files were checked.
The computer networks that were targeted included the ticketing, entry checking etc. Many of the attacks were ‘denial-of-service’ attacks which, if successful, would jam entire networks. Also, if the computerized system for entry at the CWG venues would have broken down, it would have put the entire event in danger. But, fortunately none of these attacks could even clear the first layer of the security check.
India boasts as the cyber security initiative proved to be a huge success. It would also serve as a model which can be replicated in major national networks, and used for cyber security in critical sectors such as railways, aviation and telecommunications.
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Aditi Rindani 