In January 2025, Karnataka’s web-based property registration portal, Kaveri 2.0, suffered a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.

• Due to the DDoS attack, property registrations were severely impacted, with a significant drop in the number of transactions on February 1 and  2025.

What is a DDoS Attack?

• A DDoS attack overwhelms a targeted server or network by flooding it with internet traffic from multiple compromised systems, known as botnets. 
• Unlike a Denial of Service (DoS) attack, which originates from a single source, a DDoS attack leverages multiple sources to disrupt services.

How Does a DDoS Attack Affect Web Portals?

DDoS attacks can lead to

• Service downtime, rendering the portal inaccessible.
• Financial and reputational losses for affected organizations.
• Potential data breaches, as DDoS attacks can serve as distractions for other cyber threats.

Measures to Mitigate DDoS Attacks: To prevent such cyber threats, organizations can

• Implement advanced traffic filtering to distinguish between genuine and malicious users.
• Use CAPTCHA challenges and bot detection to prevent automated attacks.
• Enforce rate limiting to control request frequency.
• Conduct regular security audits and enhance authentication measures.

Other Prominent DDoS Attacks

• Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) targeted in August 2024, causing service disruptions before his scheduled conversation with Donald Trump.
• GitHub was attacked in 2015 by a China-based botnet, aiming to disable projects that helped users bypass Chinese censorship.