Ahmedabad, May 20 (PTI) The Gujarat Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) on Tuesday arrested an 18-year-old youth, who along with a minor, was allegedly involved in temporarily taking down nearly 20 government websites post Operation Sindoor, an official said.
The ATS arrested Jaseem Ansari, a resident of Nadiad town in Kheda district, a day after it registered an FIR against him and his friend, a minor boy, on the charges of cyber terrorism, the agency stated in a release.
The duo has been booked under sections 43 and 66(f) of the Information Technology Act, which deals with cyber terrorism-related offences, Deputy Inspector General of Police, ATS, Sunil Joshi said.
He said the accused had earlier tried to take down nearly 50 government websites in six months using hacking tools and posted the screenshots of the affected websites on their Telegram group with anti-India messages such as "Hi India, we just took down your financial shield and servers".
The boys had turned "anti-national" due to "online radicalisation", the official told reporters.
Based on a tip-off about a Telegram group named 'Anonsec', an ATS team zeroed in on Ansari and his friend and unearthed their activities after confiscating their mobile phones.
As per the ATS release, the duo had attacked nearly 50 websites of various Central and state departments, such as defence, finance and aviation, in the past six months using a 'DDoS' tool.
A Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack is a type of cyber attack that floods a network or server with malicious traffic from multiple sources, making it unavailable to legitimate users, it said.
The duo became more active in April and May, especially after Operation Sindoor of the Indian Army on May 7, the release said.
Ansari and his friend intensified their DDoS attack after May 7, as they were unhappy with the launch of Operation Sindoor, and targeted nearly 20 websites of the state and the Centre, it stated.
They also wrote a message on their group, saying "India may have started it, but we will be the ones to finish it", said the release.