Bangladesh alerted of cyber-attack on August 15

Staff Reporter  :
A group of hackers threatened to attack the cyber world of Bangladesh on August 15. In view of the threat, a cyber-security alert has been issued by the Government’s Computer Incident Response Team (BGD e-Gov CIRT), according to a press release issued on Friday by the CIRT.

The alert notice signed by Mohammad Saiful Alam Khan, Director of CIRT Project, said that on July 31, a hacker group claimed the cyberspace of Bangladesh would be attacked on August 15.

In view of this, CIRT has warned about potential cyber-attacks on banks and financial institutions, healthcare, and all types of government and private organisations.

The hacker group calls itself “hacktivists” and has targeted Bangladesh and Pakistan, CIRT said.

It also said their recent research has identified several hacker groups influenced by the same ideology, who have been conducting regular cyber-attacks against various organisations in Bangladesh.

The screenshot provided by the BGD e-GOVT CIRT in the press release shows that the hackers claimed themselves to be Indian.

BGD e-GOVT CIRT mentions some of the recent notable cyber-attacks targeting Bangladesh.

These include a hacker group claiming a cyber-attack on payment gateways, law enforcement agencies and the banking sector in Bangladesh on 1 August.

On 3 July, a hacker group claimed a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack on Bangladeshi transportation service making the website unavailable for an hour.

On 27 June, a hacker group defaced the website of a Bangladesh government college and shared a web archive supporting their claims.

The similar thing was done on the site of a health sector organisation on 24 June.

CIRT requested all organisations in Bangladesh to take some measures to ensure their infrastructures’ security. It asked to ensure strict network and user activity monitoring 24/7, especially during non-office hours, and watch out for any indication of data exfiltration.

It also asked to ensure implementing load balancer solutions to ensure that no single server is overwhelmed during an attack, deploy a Web Application Firewall to analyse incoming HTTP/HTTPS traffic and filter out malicious requests and traffic patterns commonly associated with DDoS attacks.