Karnataka’s critical information infrastructure has come under attack again
Kaveri 2.0, a web portal that was launched in 2023 to streamline property registrations in Karnataka, came under a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack carried out through Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered bots recently.
The DDoS attack crippled the portal, bringing property registrations across Karnataka almost to a halt for many days in January and February, possibly causing huge revenue losses to the State exchequer.
This is not the first time that the State’s critical information infrastructure has come under attack.
In 2017, the Karnataka State Data Centre fell victim to the WannaCry ransomware attack, which spreads by exploiting vulnerabilities in the Windows operating system. In 2019, the State’s e-procurement portal was hacked leading to a theft of ₹11.5 crore.
In 2022, the systems of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences were attacked. However, as the DDoS attack shows, no lessons seem to have been learned from earlier attacks and the gaps identified in the State’s response have still not been filled.
