BJP's official website comes under DDoS attack, goes offline; Congress' Divya Spandana mocks hack

The official website of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came under the attack of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) on Monday — which is a malicious attempt to disrupt normal traffic of a targeted server, service or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of internet traffic, according to Cloudflare. The website,  www.bjp.org, was down on Tuesday morning and a webpage with a message saying Error 522 showed up in its place. Some Twitter users also flagged the same on social media. [caption id=“attachment_6197991” align=“alignnone” width=“800”] Screenshot of the webpage of the error message which showed up in place of the BJP website.[/caption] According to Cloudflare, a DDoS attack requires an attacker to gain control of a network of online machines in order to carry out an attack. Computers and other machines (such as IoT devices) are infected with malware, turning each one into a bot (or zombie). The attacker then has remote control over the group of bots, which is called a botnet. And when the IP address of a victim is targeted by the botnet, each bot will respond by sending requests to the target, potentially causing the targeted server or network to overflow capacity, resulting in a denial-of-service to normal traffic. That is, in such a situation normal traffic routed to the website would be stopped from accessing it and the website won’t open for viewers. The website was taken offline after it was reportedly defaced by hackers. According to some reports, the content of the website was replaced with a GIF featuring Prime Minister Narendra Modi and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. And, the main page of the website had a video of muppets singing the song ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. The site currently remains offline with a message from the admin, which reads, “We’ll be back soon! Sorry for the inconvenience but we’re performing some maintenance at the moment. we’ll be back online shortly!” According to PTI, there has been no official response from the BJP about it either. Meanwhile, Congress’ media in-charge Divya Spandana took a dig at the party and tweeted:

Bhaiya aur Bhehno if you’re not looking at the BJP website right now- you’re missing out

— Ramya/Divya Spandana (@divyaspandana) March 5, 2019