TRAI has offered over 10,50,000 email IDs of users all across India to Spammers and advertisers on a platter. The very successful Save the Internet campaign which was created to gather support Net Neutrality campaign may have attracted tremendous response from Indian users, however, people who sent emails based on this campaign will now have to suffer at the hands of spammers, marketers and advertisers for a very long time to come.
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For spammers, advertiser or marketers – these email addresses (along with names) are a huge goldmine. These are active email addresses and demographic of these users is well known. People who know Net Neutrality and were part of Save The Internet campaign were mostly professionals and even entrepreneurs and CXO’s. Getting their email IDs and that too in range of over one million is huge. The spammers have to just skim through the html files and pdf files that have been uploaded to TRAI website and create a list and start bombarding these emails with spam messages.
Of all the organizations, a body like TRAI should do it is unbelievable. They are telecom regulatory body, they need to understand the consequences of such a step. Unfortunately, the folks over at TRAI seem to be out of their mind to make these email IDs public.
While now, after reading the backlash, they may remove it from the site, but the damage is now already done. This list of over 1 million email IDs will now get circulated all across the internet and will be available to anyone and everyone to be taken advantage of.
And, it may not be just spammers, these email IDs could also be used by anti-social elements for things we cannot comprehend right now!
If at all TRAI wanted to make the statements public, they just needed to obfuscate the email addresses (which most forums do), and problem would have been solved. But TRAI, did not give a moments thought before uploading that list!
And now hacker group Anonymous India has brought down Indian telecom regulator Trai's official website following the public release of email IDs .
In a series of tweets, Anonymous India claimed responsibility for bringing down trai.gov.in and also warned that the site will soon be hacked. It looks like the group has launched a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack on the website to make it inaccessible.
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