MUMBAI: India’s two leading exchanges – the NSE and the BSE- have curtailed website access by entities from abroad after millions of cyberattacks were detected in the last few days. Only some IP addresses of clients of the two bourses have been white-listed to allow access from abroad, sources said.The two exchanges are also in touch with the govt’s cyber threat mitigating agencies, they said.The limited access protocol doesn’t anyway affect trading by foreign funds in India, market players said.In the backdrop of the recent killing of Indians at Pahalgam in Kashmir, cyberattacks against Indian websites have increased.

Top officials of the two exchanges had a joint meeting after attempts to break into the websites of one of the two bourses was detected. They decided to stop access to their websites from abroad, an exchange source said.“BSE being a critical market infrastructure institution (MII) proactively and continuously monitors risks at domestic and international level for potential cyber threats. Based on such monitoring of cyber traffic, as a precautionary and protective measure, websites/locations are blocked to protect users and systems,” a spokesperson for the exchange said. “The monitoring is dynamic and access is restored on a case-to-case basis subject to assessment of the threat.” NSE was yet to reply to a request for comment on the issue. Sources with the two bourses also said that after the access was curtailed, some of their clients based outside India had reached out to them. After that some IP addresses were allowed through which access ban to their websites was lifted.The sources added that there has been no loss of data and cyber security walls have not been breached. The limited access protocol is temporary in nature and once the probability of cyberattacks come down, normal access will be restored, they said. Since the terrorist attacks at Pahalgam, some of the websites of govt institutions and affiliated bodies were hacked by foreign-based cybercriminals.