The Hindu : Hacker threat to CBEC website

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Apr 30, 2002

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Hacker threat to CBEC website

By K. Srinivas Reddy

HYDERABAD April 29. The ``Anti-India Crew'' (AIC), a hacker group which has been defacing the websites of the Indian Government, has announced that it would be defacing the website of the Central Board of Excise and Customs (CBEC), www.cbec.gov.in within two days and challenged the Indian teenage hacker, Ankit Fadia, to prevent the defacement.

The AIC, appears to have thrown the gauntlet before Mr. Fadia, after rediff.com put up an interview of the New Delhi-based hacker who shot to fame with his recent book titled ``Unofficial Guide to Ethical hacking''.

It was only two days ago, the AIC and another hacker group WFD defaced a Government site epfindia.gov.in and dedicated it to Mr. Fadia in mock deference to his capabilities to hack or prevent hacking.

The current challenge to Mr. Fadia was made by the AIC while responding to an e-mail query by this correspondent. The AIC hacker challenged that Mr. Fadia could patch the vulnerable website in two days.

What appears to have angered the AIC was the claim in the rediff interview that Mr. Fadia had alerted a U.S. spy agency which hired him after he eavesdropped on the chat of some Pakistani hackers planning to hack an Indian website. According to the interview, the site was pulled down and reloaded with anti-cracking software in place.

The AIC, in its e-mail, questioned as to why Mr. Fadia had to alert a U.S. agency and if he was capable enough he could have ``hacked the site himself and patched it so that the Paki hackers could not do anything bad''. The AIC maintained that if it succeeded in hacking the CBEC site, Mr. Fadia should stop calling himself a hacker.

In their detailed e-mail reply, the AIC maintained that they did not abuse or harm the Indian servers.``We just protest by tampering the main website of a server. We don't sniff, We don't steal,'' the AIC said while ridiculing the Indian media's claim of the VSNL putting up many firewalls to prevent hacking.

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