Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), has published the email IDs and contents of emails sent to them by the people, regarding Net Neutrality in India. This resulted in taking down the official site of TRAI by ‘Anonymous India’, a group of hackers.It took responsibility for the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack and bringing the site down.
They went all out to challenge the security system at the TRAI, pointing out that if they cannot handle their own website, what can they handle the Internet in the country.
“TRAI down!” tweeted AnonOpsIndia, linking to the inaccessible site, and abusing them “for releasing email IDs publicly and helping spammers.” “You will be hacked soon!” it warned. More tweets followed, trolling TRAI.
The stated reason for the attack was TRAI’s decision to put out the email addresses of all those who had responded to the regulator about its consultation paper, which covered net neutrality and the need for further regulation in India. The vast majority of those were people who had sent in their responses through SaveTheInternet.in, a pro-neutrality campaign that logged in more than a million emails. But the responses also came from telecom companies, industry bodies and others, including citizens opposed to neutrality.
The site was re-accessible after a short downtime.
While the landing page earlier said the website was down, the hacker group on Monday posted on its Twitter account: “‘Host is down’ all over my terminal. Thank you! Boom Boom.”