16 lakh ‘DDos’ attacks per minute on G20 website during summit: Govt

The official website of the 2023 G20 Summit – the event was hosted by India – witnessed 16 lakh cyberattacks per minute even as the 2-day conference was on, on September 9 and 10, the Centre’s cybercrime body said on Wednesday.

“During G20, in one minute, on the G20 website, on the day of the summit, we had around 16 lakh attacks coming. If you put a figure on that, we will say that one minute, 16 lakh attacks coming,” Rajesh Kumar, CEO, Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) told reporters at the agency’s annual press conference.

The nature of the attack was ‘DDoS’ (distributed denial-of-service), Kumar further stated, adding that this was being done in an attempt to bring down the website. The attempts, however, failed as relevant agencies worked together to prevent such an attack, he added.

Also, Kumar said that ‘malicious activities’ began the moment the G20 portal went up months of the actual event, and ‘peaked’ during the event. He categorised these as a ‘security incident.’

2023 G20 Summit

The first-ever Group of Twenty conference to be held in India, the summit took place at New Delhi’s Bharat Mandapam Convention Centre, with prime minister Narendra Modi serving as the host. The 17th G20 Summit was held in Indonesia in November 2022, and the 19th one will take place in Brazil in November this year.