The Gujarat Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) has arrested an 18-year-old named Jasim Shahnawaz Ansari from Nadiad on charges of cyber terrorism. The Gujarat ATS has filed an FIR against him under Sections 43 and 66F of the Information Technology Act, pressing cyber terrorism charges.
According to reports, Ansari had a hand in a series of cyberattacks on Indian government digital infrastructure, a spree that officials claim intensified in the wake of India’s Operation Sindoor—a retaliatory action following the Pahalgam terror strike.
According to intelligence sources within the ATS, the arrest was the result of meticulous surveillance and monitoring of digital activities. Ansari and a group of juveniles are believed to have executed over 50 cyberattacks between April and May 2025, targeting websites belonging to critical sectors such as defence, finance, aviation, urban development, and various state governments.
The investigation unearthed that Ansari, a recent class-12 science failure, was not acting alone. Reports claimed that he created a group on Telegram under the moniker AnonSec, where he and his cohorts coordinated Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks which crippled websites by flooding them with overwhelming traffic.
An ATS officer disclosed that the group frequently changed its name and operated under multiple digital aliases, actively spreading anti-national propaganda after each successful breach.Digital forensics revealed Ansari’s modus operandi. He is said to have self-trained in Python programming using YouTube tutorials and employed cyberattack tools sourced from GitHub.
These tools were run through mobile applications such as Termux and Pydroid to conduct the actual attacks. The success of their digital assaults was then verified through platforms like checkhost.net, with screenshots circulated within the group, often accompanied by incendiary messages. One such post, officials noted, mockingly declared, “Hi, India, we just took down your shield and servers.”
Further escalating their operations, the group allegedly launched a concentrated attack on May 7, 2025, when twenty government websites were simultaneously targeted. ATS officials reported that messages like, “India may have started it, but we will be the ones to finish it,” were shared within the group—underscoring the malicious intent behind the campaign.
Officials confirmed that one of Ansari’s collaborators is a 17-year-old currently studying in class-12. While some leads suggest the actions may have been self-initiated, the ATS has not ruled out the possibility of foreign influence. An ongoing probe is focused on uncovering digital footprints, analysing software tools used, and tracing the deeper network behind the attacks.
The scale, coordination, and ideological undercurrents of these cyber offensives mark a dangerous new front in anti-India operations—one that is being waged not with bombs, but with bandwidth.
