New Delhi: The BJP's website, bjp.org, came under a massive attack from hackers based in Pakistan on Tuesday morning. The attack was, however, effectively repulsed, only after a couple of minutes, and the website escaped with a minor 'defacement'. 

Top party sources told MyNation that the incident occurred between 11.30am and 11.35am. Later, the website was taken offline.

The website had stopped responding to user requests and displayed an 'Error 522' message, an evidence of a ‘distributed denial-of-service’ (DDoS) attack. The website is currently displaying the message, ‘We’ll be back soon — sorry for the inconvenience but we are performing some maintenance at the moment. We’ll be back online shortly’.

The Congress social media head Divya Spandana made the most of the attack on the BJP website and took Pakistan's side. “Bhaiya aur bhehno (brothers and sisters), if you’re not looking at the BJP website right now — you’re missing out,” she wrote on Twitter.

The sources added that after the Pulwama attack, and especially after the February 26 air strikes by the Indian Air Force (IAF) at Pakistan’s Balakot terror training camp, there had been a consistent rise in the number of hacking attempts made on the website of the BJP, that rules at the Centre.

Also read: Indian hackers launch surgical strike on over 200 Pakistani websites to avenge Pulwama massacre

“Attempts to hack and attack our website originate mainly from three regions, namely Pakistan, China and Russia. The threat is a daily affair and we have to ward off such attempts quite often. The BJP’s national website is a threat magnet in that sense,” said a top functionary of the party’s social media and IT infrastructure.

The BJP website sees massive traffic everyday, which, according to a rough estimate, reaches at least three lakh.

Also read: Congress's Divya Spandana, Prashant Bhushan join hands to exploit Pulwama terror to attack security forces, Modi govt

After the Pulwama attack, a group of Indian hackers called ‘Team I-Crew’ had hacked nearly 200 Pakistani websites to avenge the attack on the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) convoy that left nearly 50 jawans dead.

Immediately after the attack, Pakistani hackers attacked nearly 100 Indian government websites, including essential support systems. The Congress website was hacked in 2011, while the Supreme Court's website was hacked in 2018.