Hacker group Anonymous India on their way to support cartoonist Aseem Trivedi and Alok dixit who are protesting against controversial section 66A of the Information Technology Act, today hacked down Govt owned telecom operator BSNL website (www.bsnl.co.in/). The main BSNL website along with several state based BSNL sub sites where also down.
The hacker group posted following message along with Aseem Trivedi’s picture,
Hacked by Anonymous india
Support Aseem trivedi (cartoonist) and alok dixit on the hunger strike
remove IT Act 66a
database of all 250 bsnl site has been deleted...Do not think of BACKUP
Hacked by Anonymous india
Anonymous India claims to hacked the full BSNL server with 250 database on it. They have exposed passwords for the database connection which where dumped on a pastebin file, there was no personal information leaked. If you check on the pastebin dump data, we can see BSNL using low quality passwords like “Password123?, “enquiry999?, ‘detbill210″, “jkdvpt”, “password” which are used to protect India’s 5th largest telecom operators website and database information. It clearly exposes how Govt departments are handling security in their end.
Update: Anonymous India has commented that “In the BSNL hack, only the DB connection information was leaked and no personal info about any BSNL user was leaked.“
Now coming back to the controversial section 66A of the Information Technology Act, it says – “Punishment for sending offensive messages through communication service, etc.: Any person who sends, by means of a computer resource or a communication device“(read more Information Technology Act). This was the same Act used recently by police to arrest two girls on posting comments on Facebook against bandh and also arrest of two Air India employees for posting comments on Facebook. There are has been lots of misuse of this Act by police with support from politicians. (So be careful next time while posting your anger against any politicians in social networks.)
During the time of posting this news, most of the BSNL websites seems to be back online with correct website data on it, still Google cache displays the hacked website. Anonymous India is hyper active in exposing Govt and corporates intentions against people, some months ago only they exposed Reliance ISP Block list.
Do you support Anonymous India or the Act? comment your views.