Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal has said that India was largely unaffected by the Internet slowdown caused by what is being called the ‘largest ever’ cyber attack along with an unfortunately timed under-sea cable cut. “Only BSNL services were affected in south India; websites slowed down by 3 to 4 percent”, said the Telecom Minister to NDTV.
The cyber attack which affected Internet services in large areas of Western Europe and some parts of Asia, occured when Spamhaus, a London and Geneva-based non-profit group which helps weed out unsolicited “spam” messages for email providers, said it had been subjected to “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attacks on an unprecedented scale for more than a week.
Spamhaus publishes blacklists used by internet service providers (ISPs) to weed out spam in email traffic. The group is directly or indirectly responsible for filtering as much as 80 per cent of daily spam messages, according to Cloudflare, a company that said it was helping Spamhaus mitigate the attack.
“We’ve been under this cyber-attack for well over a week,” Steve Linford, chief executive of Spamhaus, told the BBC. “They are targeting every part of the Internet infrastructure that they feel can be brought down.”
However, despite reports that there was a “global” slowdown of the Internet as a result of the attack, many countries including the US and India were not affected.
The bigger threat to Indian net users was caused by an undersea cable cut — the South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe 4 (SEA-ME-WE 4) cable which caused a slowdown in and around Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia. The cut was said to be near Alexandria in Egypt.
Tech site Gigaom said, “While the cut was on a single cable, it came at an unfortunate time as a few other major cables were in “maintenance mode” and that has resulted in problems for service providers across the region. Our sources in the telecom community confirmed that two other cables — Europe India Gateway (EIG) and India-Middle East-Western Europe (IMEWE) — were in ‘maintenance’ mode when the SWM4 got cut. The result is downstream congestion on networks that are going to India and around the Indian Ocean.”
However Sibal said that Internet speeds were not affected in India.
Not that India’s Internet speeds are anything to be proud of. Google’s Chairman Eric Schmidt who was in India earlier this month said that a severe lack of fibre optic connectivity in India, which has been widely acknowledged to be the future of high speed Internet was affecting the country’s ability to be a part of the “Internet revolution”.
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