Trai website hacked over net neutrality row - India Today

Hacker group AnonOpsIndia has launched a DDoS attack on the Trai website.Hacker group AnonOpsIndia has launched a DDoS attack on the Trai website.The website of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) was allegedly hacked on Monday by a group called AnonOpsIndia, which claimed it had taken down the platform through a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

The alleged hacking took place few hours after the Trai revealed the email addresses of over one million people who had written to it expressing their views on a consultation paper on the controversial issue of net neutrality.

"Trai forgot about us hahaha! We reminded them that we are still here. BOOM BOOM http://trai.gov.in," said a tweet from AnonOpsIndia.

Petitions

On March 27, the telecom regulator had floated a consultation paper on putting in place a regulatory framework for over-the-top (OTT) services and April 24 was the last date to submit comments.

Later, the Trai had received over 10 lakh petitions on the matter and as is the normal practice, Trai uploaded all the comments on its website. Due to huge traffic, the Trai website also went down. As the number of comments was huge, Trai has divided the comments under three categories - comments from service providers, comments from service providers associations and comments from other stakeholders.

However, the regulator drew flak from people for exposing their privacy.

Spammers

"Congrats Trai on releasing the mail ids of everyone who mailed you about net neutrality. Now we know how well you protect Internet users," senior journalist Vir Sanghvi tweeted.

The Trai's move had made email IDs of the respondents potentially available to spammers.

Experts said if a person had sent his or her views on net neutrality by sending an email to Trai any time in the past month, they would be a sitting duck for all sorts of spam as spammers could easily pick up their email addresses and misuse it.

Moreover, the Trai's move was no doubt damaging. AnonOpsIndia has also defended its move to bring down the site saying that this was done to deny spammers access to the one million email IDs.

"So those who still think that #TRAi can "handle" the Internet, we just proved you wrong.They just got trolled by bunch of kids.#Incompetence," said another tweet from AnonOpsIndia.

Experts said transparency is fine, but ignoring user privacy is simply not acceptable as it has happened in this case, especially as email nowadays is linked to many social media accounts like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and even banks.

Neutrality

Another tweet said: Hi TRAI, it is NOT okay for a govt. regulator to expose 1M+ email id's of respondents to your OTT paper! Do please note, Shri @rsprasad.

The issue of net neutrality has been raging fire recently. Even Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi spoke in favour of net neutrality and alleged the government was carving out Internet to please some corporators.

However, the regulator drew the ire of people for exposing the privacy of people.

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