#FactCheck-Viral Video Claiming to Show Flooded Chapra Railway Station Is AI-Generated

Executive Summary:

One of the most complex threats that have appeared in the space of network security is focused on the packet rate attacks that tend to challenge traditional approaches to DDoS threats’ involvement. In this year, the British based biggest Internet cloud provider of Europe, OVHcloud was attacked by a record and unprecedented DDoS attack reaching the rate of 840 million packets per second. Targets over 1 Tbps have been observed more regularly starting from 2023, and becoming nearly a daily occurrence in 2024. The maximum attack on May 25, 2024, got to 2.5 Tbps, this points to a direction to even larger and more complex attacks of up to 5 Tbps. Many of these attacks target critical equipment such as Mikrotik models within the core network environment; detection and subsequent containment of these threats prove a test for cloud security measures.

Modus Operandi of a Packet Rate Attack:

A type of cyberattack where an attacker sends with a large volume of packets in a short period of time aimed at a network device is known as packet rate attack, or packet flood attack or network flood attack under volumetric DDoS attack. As opposed to the deliberately narrow bandwidth attacks, these raids target the computation time linked with package processing. 

Key technical characteristics include: 

• Packet Size: Usually compact, and in many cases is less than 100 bytes 
• Protocol: Named UDP, although it can also involve TCP SYN or other protocol flood attacks 
•  Rate: Exceeding 100 million packets per second (Mpps), with recent attacks exceeding 840 Mpps 
• Source IP Diversity: Usually originating from a small number of sources and with a large number of requests per IP, which testifies about the usage of amplification principles 
• Attack on the Network Stack : To understand the impact, let's examine how these attacks affect different layers of the network stack:

1. Layer 3 (Network Layer):

• Each packet requires routing table lookups and hence routers and L3 switches have the problem of high CPU usage. 
• These mechanisms can often be saturated so that network communication will be negatively impacted by the attacker.

2. Layer 4 (Transport Layer):

• Other stateful devices (e.g. firewalls, load balancers) have problems with tables of connections 
• TCP SYN floods can also utilize all connection slots so that no incoming genuine connection can be made.

3. Layer 7 (Application Layer): 

• Web servers and application firewalls may be triggered to deliver a better response in a large number of requests 
• Session management systems can become saturated, and hence, the performance of future iterations will be a little lower than expected in terms of their perceived quality by the end-user. 

Technical Analysis of Attack Vectors

Recent studies have identified several key vectors exploited in high-volume packet rate attacks:

1.MikroTik RouterOS Exploitation:

• Vulnerability: CVE-2023-4967
• Impact: Allows remote attackers to generate massive packet floods
• Technical detail: Exploits a flaw in the FastTrack implementation

2.DNS Amplification:

• Amplification factor: Up to 54x
• Technique: Exploits open DNS resolvers to generate large responses to small queries
• Challenge: Difficult to distinguish from legitimate DNS traffic

3.NTP Reflection:

• Command: monlist
• Amplification factor: Up to 556.9x
• Mitigation: Requires NTP server updates and network-level filtering

Mitigation Strategies: A Technical Perspective

1. Combating packet rate attacks requires a multi-layered approach:

• Hardware-based Mitigation:
• Implementation: FPGA-based packet processing
• Advantage: Can handle millions of packets per second with minimal latency
• Challenge: High cost and specialized programming requirements

2.Anycast Network Distribution:

• Technique: Distributing traffic across multiple global nodes
• Benefit: Dilutes attack traffic, preventing single-point failures
• Consideration: Requires careful BGP routing configuration

3.Stateless Packet Filtering:

• Method: Applying filtering rules without maintaining connection state
• Advantage: Lower computational overhead compared to stateful inspection
• Trade-off: Less granular control over traffic

4.Machine Learning-based Detection:

• Approach: Using ML models to identify attack patterns in real-time
• Key metrics: Packet size distribution, inter-arrival times, protocol anomalies
• Challenge: Requires continuous model training to adapt to new attack patterns

Performance Metrics and Benchmarking

When evaluating DDoS mitigation solutions for packet rate attacks, consider these key performance indicators:

• Flows per second (fps) or packet per second (pps) capability
• Dispersion and the latency that comes with it is inherent to mitigation systems.
• The false positive rate in the case of the attack detection
• Exposure time before beginning of mitigation from the moment of attack

Way Forward

The packet rate attacks are constantly evolving where the credible defenses have not stayed the same. The next step entails extension to edge computing and 5G networks for distributing mitigation closer to the attack origins. Further, AI-based proactive tools of analysis for prediction of such threats will help to strengthen the protection of critical infrastructure against them in advance.

In order to stay one step ahead in this, it is necessary to constantly conduct research, advance new technologies, and work together with other cybersecurity professionals. There is always a need to develop secure defenses that safeguard these networks.

Reference:

https://blog.ovhcloud.com/the-rise-of-packet-rate-attacks-when-core-routers-turn-evil/

https://cybersecuritynews.com/record-breaking-ddos-attack-840-mpps/

https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ddos/famous-ddos-attacks/

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Introduction

Meta smart glasses are now banned from courts across England and Wales. His Majesty's Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS), the body responsible for criminal, civil, and family courts throughout the jurisdiction, has confirmed that anyone entering a court building wearing the devices will have them confiscated at the door and returned only when they leave. The decision follows a comparable restriction introduced by New York's court system weeks earlier, and it lands at a moment when Meta's artificial intelligence (AI) powered eyewear, now sold in more than seven million pairs worldwide, has already been turned away from a wide range of British venues, from pubs and restaurants to theatres and members' clubs, over the same underlying worry: that a camera built into an ordinary looking pair of glasses can record people who have no way of knowing it is happening. Courts occupy a category of their own in this debate. Photography and recording inside a courtroom have been prohibited for the better part of a century, precisely because the integrity of witness testimony, jury deliberation, and the dignity of the proceedings depend on people being able to speak and be observed only by those the law intends. Smart glasses do not just test that rule. They expose a gap in how it was ever meant to be enforced.

What actually changed, and why smartphones were never the real problem

Unauthorised filming inside a courtroom can be prosecuted as contempt of court. Smartphones, despite carrying multiple cameras, have always been let through security on a kind of implicit social contract: everyone understands that the device could record, everyone understands that using it to do so is a punishable offence, and the visible act of holding a phone up to film someone is itself a signal that can be seen and stopped. As per reports citing an HMCTS spokesperson, "There are clear restrictions on taking images or videos within courts and tribunals which is why the use of Meta glasses is prohibited."

Smart glasses dissolve that social contract. A person wearing them looks, to everyone around them, exactly like a person not recording anything at all. 

The wider pattern this fits into

England and Wales did not act in isolation. New York's court system introduced a comparable restriction weeks earlier, following an incident during a trial in which a presiding judge warned Meta's own legal team, present in court wearing the company's glasses, that recording proceedings would be treated as contempt. Reports note that the same device has already been shut out of a striking range of everyday venues across Britain, including a major pub chain, high end restaurants, private members' clubs, theatres, music venues, and comic book conventions, with critics giving the product the unflattering nickname "pervert glasses" well before any court got involved.

That pattern matters analytically because it shows this is not really a story about courts distrusting one particular gadget. It is a story about physical spaces everywhere recalibrating what "no recording" can plausibly mean once recording no longer requires a visible object pointed at someone. Meta, for its part, has said the glasses carry a pulsing light-emitting diode (LED) indicator that activates during recording and tamper detection technology intended to stop wearers covering the light, and the company has shipped more than seven million pairs, commanding, according to reports, more than 80 percent of the global AI eyewear market. None of that changes how the device is experienced by the person being recorded, who typically has no reliable way of noticing a small light on the side of someone's face across a room.

There is a genuine innovation story sitting underneath this controversy, and it deserves to be told honestly rather than dismissed. Wearable AI devices that layer translation, navigation, accessibility support, and hands free computing onto ordinary looking eyewear represent one of the more interesting consumer hardware categories to emerge in years, and the underlying engineering, fitting a camera, microphones, speakers, and AI processing into frames that look like Ray-Bans, is a legitimate technical achievement. The court ban is not a verdict on that achievement. It is a verdict on a specific gap between what the hardware makes physically possible and what existing social and legal norms were designed to detect and police. Those are two different conversations, and collapsing them into one tends to produce worse policy on both sides.

Reading the legal architecture underneath the ban

What HMCTS has effectively done is draw a bright line around function rather than form. Smartphones stay in because the courts are relying on deterrence, the near certainty of visible detection and prosecution if someone is caught filming, to manage the risk they pose. Smart glasses are excluded because that deterrence model breaks down when the recording apparatus is invisible by design. Clara Westbrook, a privacy law partner quoted in coverage of the decision, framed the underlying issue as a gap between the technology and the rules meant to govern it, rather than a simple case of institutional overreaction. That framing holds up under scrutiny. Courtroom rules were written for an era in which recording devices announced themselves. Smart glasses were engineered, whatever the stated intent, to do the opposite.

The view from India

Photography and videography are already prohibited inside Indian court premises as a general rule. Filming inside courtrooms has long been treated as a threat to witness candour, judicial dignity, and the orderly conduct of proceedings, and the principle has been reinforced recently. The Supreme Court, in a circular issued in September 2025, imposed a strict ban on photography, videography, and the creation of social media content within its High Security Zone, prohibiting mobile phones, cameras, tripods, and similar equipment except for official use. More recently, in an interim order passed in 2026, the Court went further, restricting the extraction, editing, and re-dissemination of audio-video recordings of judicial proceedings on social media or digital platforms without prior written permission from the Registrar General of the concerned High Court or the Secretary General of the Supreme Court.

Read together, these rules already prohibit the underlying act that smart glasses would enable inside a courtroom, unauthorized capture and circulation of what happens during a hearing. In that sense, Meta glasses are indirectly covered the moment someone wears a pair inside an Indian court, since using them to record would fall squarely within conduct the existing circulars already forbid. What has not happened, and this distinction matters, is any explicit order naming smart glasses as a class of device to be confiscated or barred at entry, the way HMCTS has now done in England and Wales. Indian courts have regulated the act of recording. They have not yet regulated the device that makes covert recording structurally easier to commit without detection. 

It remains to be seen whether Indian courts will explicitly name and ban Meta glasses, rather than relying on existing photography rules to cover them indirectly. If that happens, the reasoning will be drawn on constitutional privacy jurisprudence or courtroom security concerns already in play.

Conclusion

What courts owe the people who appear before them is not hostility toward innovation, but a firm defence of the trust a courtroom is built on, that witnesses can speak freely, that proceedings remain what they are meant to be, and that privacy inside those walls is not negotiable. The question worth asking is not what smart glasses can see, but what courts must protect. Innovation earns its place by respecting the spaces it enters, not by outrunning their rules.

References

1. The Guardian, "Meta glasses banned from courts in England and Wales," 11 August 2026 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/11/meta-glasses-banned-from-courts-in-england-and-wales
2. Engadget, "England and Wales ban Meta Glasses from courtrooms.”  https://www.engadget.com/2234606/england-and-wales-ban-meta-glasses-from-courtrooms/
3. TechRepublic, "England and Wales Courts Ban Meta Smart Glasses Over Recording Risks." https://www.techrepublic.com/article/news-meta-smart-glasses-ban-england-wales-courts/
4. BM Magazine, "Meta glasses banned from courts across England and Wales." https://bmmagazine.co.uk/legal/meta-glasses-banned-courts-england-wales/
5.  IBTimes UK" UK Court Service Bans Meta Smart Glasses After Restaurants, Theatres and Pubs Lead 'Spyware' Privacy Push." https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/uk-courts-ban-meta-smart-glasses-privacy-concerns-18141
6. 97 Boing Boing, "English courts ban Meta glasses and other spyware." https://boingboing.net/2026/08/11/english-courts-ban-meta-glasses-and-other-spywear.html
7. MediaPost, "Meta Smart Glasses Banned In England, Wales Courtrooms." https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/417180/meta-smart-glasses-banned-in-england-wales-courtr.html
8. LiveLaw, "When Seeing Becomes Recording: Invisible Bystander And Limits Of Indian Privacy Law." https://www.livelaw.in/lawschool/articles/invisible-bystander-limits-indian-privacy-law-545517
9. PCQuest "B by Lenskart AI Glasses: India's Privacy Laws May Not Be Ready." https://www.pcquest.com/tech-trends/b-by-lenskart-ai-smart-glasses-india-privacy-dpdp-act-12141827
10. MediaNama, "Meta tightens AI glasses security as questions over bystander privacy persist." https://www.medianama.com/2026/07/223-meta-tightens-ai-glasses-security-questions-bystander-privacy-persist/
11. India Legal, "The State Of Surveillance." https://indialegallive.com/cover-story-articles/il-feature-news/surveillance-jantar-mantar-protests-delhi-police-wearable-recording-devices/
12. Feminism In India, "AI Glasses: Is India Ready To Handle The Privacy Implications?" https://feminisminindia.com/2026/07/29/is-india-ready-to-handle-ai-glasses-social-ethical-and-regulatory-governance/
13. LiveLaw, "Supreme Court Bans Photography, Videography In Court's High Security Zone." https://www.livelaw.in/top-stories/supreme-court-bans-photography-videography-in-courts-high-security-zone-after-bars-concerns-over-reels-selfies-in-court-premises-303682
14. LiveLaw, "Supreme Court Bans Uploading and Sharing Of Audio-Video Recordings Of Court Hearings Without Prior Permission." https://www.livelaw.in/amp/top-stories/breaking-supreme-court-bans-uploading-sharing-of-audio-video-recordings-of-court-hearings-without-prior-permission-542719
15. Deccan Herald, "SC bans clicking photos, making reels in its high security zone." https://www.deccanherald.com/amp/story/india%2Fdelhi%2Fsc-bans-clicking-photos-making-reels-in-its-high-security-zone-3724668

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Executive Summary

The viral video, in which south actor Allu Arjun is seen supporting the Congress Party's campaign for the upcoming Lok Sabha Election, suggests that he has joined Congress Party. Over the course of an investigation, the CyberPeace Research Team uncovered that the video is a close up of Allu Arjun marching as the Grand Marshal of the 2022 India Day parade in New York to celebrate India’s 75th Independence Day. Reverse image searches, Allu Arjun's official YouTube channel, the news coverage, and stock images websites are also proofs of this fact. Thus, it has been firmly established that the claim that Allu Arjun is in a Congress Party's campaign is fabricated and misleading

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Claims:

The viral video alleges that the south actor Allu Arjun is using his popularity and star status as a way of campaigning for the Congress party during the 2024 upcoming Lok Sabha elections.

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Fact Check:

Initially, after hearing the news, we conducted a quick search using keywords to relate it to actor Allu Arjun joining the Congress Party but came across nothing related to this. However, we found a video by SoSouth posted on Feb 20, 2022, of Allu Arjun’s Father-in-law Kancharla Chandrasekhar Reddy joining congress and quitting former chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao's party. 

Next, we segmented the video into keyframes, and then reverse searched one of the images which led us to the Federation of Indian Association website. It says that the picture is from the 2022 India Parade. The picture looks similar to the viral video, and we can compare the two to help us determine if they are from the same event.

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Taking a cue from this, we again performed a keyword search using “India Day Parade 2022”. We found a video uploaded on the official Allu Arjun YouTube channel, and it’s the same video that has been shared on Social Media in recent times with different context. The caption of the original video reads, “Icon Star Allu Arjun as Grand Marshal @ 40th India Day Parade in New York | Highlights | #IndiaAt75”

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The Reverse Image search results in some more evidence of the real fact, we found the image on Shutterstock, the description of the photo reads, “NYC India Day Parade, New York, NY, United States - 21 Aug 2022 Parade Grand Marshall Actor Allu Arjun is seen on a float during the annual Indian Day Parade on Madison Avenue in New York City on August 21, 2022.”

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With this, we concluded that the Claim made in the viral video of Allu Arjun supporting the Lok Sabha Election campaign 2024 is baseless and false.

Conclusion:

The viral video circulating on social media has been put out of context. The clip, which depicts Allu Arjun's participation in the Indian Day parade in 2022, is not related to the ongoing election campaigns for any Political Party.

Hence, the assertion that Allu Arjun is campaigning for the Congress party is false and misleading.

• Claim: A video, which has gone viral, says that actor Allu Arjun is rallying for the Congress party.
• Claimed on: X (Formerly known as Twitter) and YouTube
• Fact Check: Fake & Misleading

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