Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Mumbai came under a heavy Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack from unknown hackers, reducing the internet surfing speed in the city, reports the Indian Express. The attacks generated 200 GB/sec traffic, slowing Internet usage to a crawl on affected ISPs. Hathway officially issued a statement to its users citing “Dear users due to International hacker attack on major Indian ISPs N/w, we are facing big issue of slow speed and fluctuation of line.” Other than this, it's not clear which ISPs are affected although this reddit thread claims that Airtel is the primary ISP being DDoSed, which distributes broadband to other smaller companies, leading to network blockages across a wide range of ISPs. Redditors and news agencies have also reported slowdowns due to these attacks in various cities of Maharashtra, however my internet connection (provided by YouBroadBand) in Pune is working fine. We expect such an attack to slow down certain portions, rather than all of the internet in a given region. A case has been registered against the unknown perpetrators with the Mumbai Cyber Crime branch. Note that it's not easy to pinpoint perpetrator of such an attack as the traffic almost always comes from other devices infected with malicious code. In fact, IP addresses to be used for making an attack can be purchased on the black market, making it very difficult to figure out the source of the attack. DDoS attacks do not let attackers into a system and as such…
