Hack Alert! TRAI’S website hacked after it makes emails of a million public

Nothing could be more alarming if the official website of The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India's (TRAI) gets hacked! Thanks to TRAI’s honesty policy, which made e-mail IDs and names of around a million people who wrote to on the issue of net neutrality public, the hackers found a reason to rejoice. As the social media exploded with netizens blaming TRAI for failing to preserve their secrecy, Hacker group Anonymous India moved a step further and brought down the TRAI website.

As per a news report by The Economic Times, "TRAI Down! XXXXXXXX TRAI for releasing email IDs publicly and helping spammers. Boom Boom! #TRAI ,"; "Host is down" all over my terminal. Thank you! Boom Boom #TRAI "; "#TRAI forgot about us hahaha! We reminded them that we are still here. BOOM http://trai.gov.in" were some of the tweets from the hacker group after bringing the site down for what it believed was violation of privacy of over a million Indians.

Though India has no law that prevents anyone from disclosing data on the Internet, the telecom regulator of the country was severely criticized for disclosing the e-mail IDs of people who had written to it over the ongoing consultation on whether to regulate app providers. Netizens panned the regulator for revealing the e-mail IDs which exposed over a million people to potential spamming and unsolicited marketing e-mails. The TRAI website allowed for downloading the entire document with the email IDs.

Emails written to the TRAI weren’t answered. The regulator revealed the names to facilitate counter-comments, the deadline for which is May 8, after which it will hold an open-house consultation before making its recommendations.

"While there cannot be anonymity in public consultations and TRAI is obliged to reveal all responses, they must not reveal the e-mail IDs/contact unless they can prove that petitioners provided no other form of identification, including a name," Rajeev Chandrasekhar, an independent lawmaker and a vocal supporter of Net Neutrality, told the ET.