The government has issued an alert as a hacker's group threats to attack on cyber system of the country likely on August 15.
Computer incident response team (BGD e-GOV CIRT) of Bangladesh Computer Council under the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Division issued the alert on Friday.
BGD e-GOV CIRT asked all critical information infrastructures, banks, financial institutions, health care and all government and non-government agencies to remain alert about possible cyber attack.
On July 31, a hacker group threatened that a 'storm of cyber attack' will happen in cyber system of Bangladesh on August 15, said a press release issued by BGD e-GOV CIRT.
The press release said the hacker group introduced themselves as 'Hacktivist' and targeted Bangladesh and Pakistan for the attack.
BGD e-GOV CIRT said their recent research has identified several hacker groups influenced by the same ideology who have been conducting regular cyber attacks on various organizations in Bangladesh.
It was seen in a screen shot attached in the press release that those who threatened for the cyber attack claimed themselves as members of Indian hacker group.
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 August 1.
On July 3, a hacker group claimed a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack on Bangladeshi transportation service making the website unavailable for an hour. Also, on July 3, a hacker group claimed that they had attacked Bangladeshi transport services for 1 hour.
On June 27, 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 June 24.
CIRT requested all organisations in Bangladesh to take the following measures to ensure their infrastructures' security: Ensure strict network and user activity monitoring 24/7, especially during non-office hours, and watch out for any indication of data exfiltration; ensure implementing load balancer solutions to ensure that no single server is overwhelmed during an attack, deploy a Web Application Firewall to analyze incoming HTTP/HTTPS traffic and filter out malicious requests and traffic patterns commonly associated with DDoS attacks; ensure vital services such as DNS, NTP as well as network middleboxes are securely configured and are not exposed on the internet; validate and sanitize all user input to prevent malicious code injection (e.g., SQL injection, Cross-Site Scripting) that could lead to web defacement; perform regular backups of your website's content and database, enforce HTTPS on your website with SSL/TLS encryption; keep all web server software, content management systems (CMS), plugins, and other software components up-to-date with the latest security patches; configure and harden web application as per OWASP guideline and report or inform BGD e-GOV CIRT regarding the detection of IOCs and/ or any suspicious activities within the system.
