112 government websites hacked in the last 3 months

Special Arrangement A screenschot of IMD-Kolkata's webpage, which has been hacked.

Finance Ministry, Planning Commission among those targeted

Government websites are turning out to be soft targets for hackers. In the last three months alone, as many as 112 websites, including that of the Planning Commission, the Finance Ministry and various State government agencies, were hacked or defaced.

“During the period December 2011 to February 2012, a total number of 112 government websites were hacked,” Minister of State for Communications and IT Sachin Pilot told the Lok Sabha on Wednesday.

While the website of Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd was hacked on December 4, 2011 by the ‘H4tr!ck' hacker group, the websites of Finance, Health, Human Resource Development ministries and Planning Commission were also defaced. Various State government websites that came under attack were from Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh, Sikkim, Manipur, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Gujarat.

Mr. Pilot said the Department of Information Technology and the National Informatics Centre (NIC) that host the majority of government websites were upgrading their skills to tackle the ever-growing threat from hackers. Firewalls were being upgraded and new filters added to ensure that hackers could not target government websites.

Notably, the government had to face major embarrassment last year after the Central Bureau of Investigation website was hacked and defaced by programmers, who identified themselves as the “Pakistani Cyber Army.” It took weeks before the website was restored. However, it was after this episode that the NIC took various measures to prevent government websites from getting hacked. As per industry estimates, over 14,000 government and corporate websites were hacked/defaced in 2011.

India's first online TV channel launched

Theviralfever.com promises to have you in splits!

A group of IITians from Mumbai and Kharagpur has launched India's first online tv channel Theviralfever.com.

After researching at various colleges across the country, the channel was started by Anurabh Kumar, 29, and his friends Himanshu Bhatnagar, Sandeep Jha, Deepak Mishra, Amit Golani, Biswapathi Sarkar, Vipin Goel and Jyotirmoy Dutta.

Viralfever promises to have you in splits with spoofs of popular reality shows, TV serials and films. Kumar, who worked briefly with Red Chillies Entertainment, had scripted a pilot for a series on the lines of American shows like Friends and Seinfeld. But there weren't any takers.

"We decided to blend our two powerful skills- creativity and tech expertise-to create an exciting entertainment space," he says.

The programming is divided into two sections: TV originals, which spoofs TV shows, and youth idea lab, airing students working in remote villages. Also on the cards are shows like Penis Monologues and Jha.One, a spoof on Ra.One.

256 BSF troopers committed suicide since 2004

New Delhi: Two hundred and fifty-six Border Security Force (BSF) personnel committed suicide between 2004 and 2011 due to various reasons, including occupational stress, the Rajya Sabha was informed Wednesday. Minister of State for Home Jitendra Singh, in a written reply, cited data provided by the BSF and the Bureau of Police Research and Development and said that these suicides could not be attributed to occupational stress alone.
A number of suicides were due to personal or domestic reasons like marital discord, mental illness, depression and unsuccessful love affairs, he said.

Facebook blocks Indian accounts with Hindi slang for c***

Facebook has blocked “thousands” of accounts in India for using the word “chutia.” In Hindi, the word is slang for “c***” but it also refers to a community in the Indian state of Assam.

The All Assam Chutia Students’ Union (AACSU) yesterday criticized Facebook for blocking “thousands” of accounts in the Chutia community. Facebook likely believes the accounts are fake or just spam, but AACSU argues it’s all a big misunderstanding. The student organization burned a Facebook effigy in the five upper Assam districts of Tinsukia, Dibrugarh, Sivasagar, Jorhat, and Golaghat on Monday and demanded public apology from the social networking giant.
“Facebook has blocked the accounts of all the subscribers belonging to the Chutia community of Assam thinking the names are false and fabricated,” AACSU general secretary Jyotiprasad Chutia told a press conference in Jorhat, according to The Times of India. “For Chutia being an abusive word in the Hindi language, Facebook authorities thought that the account holders are fake and fabricated. But, they are still unknown to the fact that Chutia is an ethnic tribe of Assam which has a rich historical background in the state history. We are very unhappy with authority as they have even failed to verify the matter seriously before taking a step like blocking thousands of our accounts. We think it may be a deep-rooted conspiracy against our community and so we warn them to abstain from such acts in the future. They even failed to verify the truth when they blocked the accounts of some prominent personalities and popular artists like Krishnamoni Chutia, who belongs to our community. We protested this negligence and demanded them to reactivate our accounts immediately.”
Chutia is a small community in Assam, a northeastern state of India. The official languages in Chutia are Assamese, Bengal, and Bodo. In India, the official languages are Hindi and English.
In Hindi, “chutia” or “chutiya” is a slang word roughly translates to “c***” in English. Those who use it are usually referring to someone as a “douchebag” or “moron” or “f***er” (according to Urban Dictionary).
It’s not clear how all the accounts in question were blocked: was it automatic or did someone authorize each of the blocks? I have contacted Facebook and will update you if I hear back.
I’d like to thank my colleague Manan Kakkar for tipping me off on this story.

India allocates bandwidth for 4G services

Operators in India will soon get to bid for a piece of the local 4G pie after government officials decided to free up the 700MHz airwave for offering 4G-related telecom services.
According to report by the Times of India on Tuesday, the government will be freeing up the bandwidth after the information and broadcasting ministry, which had earlier laid claim on it, decided to relinquish control over the airwaves.
Communications Minister Kapil Sibal added in the report that "three of the four issues" relating to the 700MHz bandwidth had been resolved. This band is considered to be very efficient and might help the government generate more revenue than when it auctioned off its 3G airwaves. India received 67,000 crore (US$14.6 billion) during the auction in 2010, he noted.
The news would come as a boost to the country's telecommunications industry as 3G services have not really taken off. An earlier ZDNet Asia report stated that while telecom operators began launching 3G services in late-2010, consumers have been complaining of patchy connections and slow speeds.
Kamlesh Bhatia, research director at Gartner, said in the report that there is nothing wrong with the technology, but the problem lies in the spectrum which was very limited. Operators got only 5MHz of spectrum, as opposed to 20MHz in other countries, and this does not support India's user traffic, he added.

India’s secret army of Tibetans without parachutes; kickbacks suspected

New Delhi: India’s secret force of Tibetans, the SFF (Special Frontier Force), raised after the 1962 border conflict with China, has been without parachutes for nearly two years on the suspicion that senior officers tried to take kickbacks.

The SFF, sometimes also referred to as Establishment-22, has been a part of India’s external intelligence agency, RAW, and was originally raised to play a role behind enemy lines in China in the event of a war.

Raised with the help of the CIA post-1962, it is a Special Forces unit almost the size of an army division and headed by a Major General on deputation. At the time of the procurement it was headed by Major General Dalbir Singh who has subsequently moved on to the North-East on promotion to command an army Corps. Parachutes are essential equipment for the SFF and are critical to the constant training and operations that the SFF undertakes on a regular basis.

Last year the SFF began the process to procure new parachutes since the ones in stock had either been used for the mandated 100 jumps or had lived their shelf life of 15 years. By May 2011 the tenders were sent out using the usual procedure that R&AW uses to mask its purchases, by using the front of a public sector undertaking that is under a different Union ministry.

The SFF put in a major criterion to select the parachutes. Any company that was bidding for the tender should have supplied parachutes to its armed forces. They also added another clause mandating that the parachutes must have been used by the military for at least five years to establish a proven track record. The SFF also ensured that the parachutes had to match the aircraft from which they would be deployed. So for any parachutes that were to be used for the Russian IL-76 aircraft, the parachutes had to be from an erstwhile “Warsaw Pact” country.

This ensured that two companies from Ukraine emerged as the front-runners for a supply of 150 parachutes for one batch, while a Spanish company emerged as the front-runner for a western aircraft that is currently used by the SFFF. Both put together, the initial purchase was to be of 300 parachutes followed by larger orders to equip the whole force. Each parachute costs about Rs1.25 lakh.

However, once the user trials began, senior officers noticed a major anomaly in the samples sent across by the two Ukranian companies. The samples, sources told DNA, were matching sequentially. “We noticed that if the serial number was 514 in one parachute, the other sample was 515. How was that possible if two separate manufacturers had sent us separate random samples? Even the lettering was the same which meant they were sent from the same manufacturer,” a senior officer from R&AW, familiar with the case, told DNA.

India lacks strong case against China

GUWAHATI, Mar 5  – India does not have a strong case against China as per international laws if the neighbouring country decides to divert the river Brahmaputra to meet its water requirement. Though the issue is being discussed by the Committee of Secretaries of the Government of India for years, no step has yet been taken to practically use the water of the river.

Highly placed official sources in New Delhi told The Assam Tribune that so far India does not have any evidence of China diverting the water of Brahmaputra river and only two run-of-the-river projects have been set up. But according to information available with the Government of India, China carried out a survey on probable diversion of water of Tsangpo river (Brahmaputra is called Tsangpo in China) to meet the water requirements of some parts of the country and the possibility of diversion of water of the river in the days to come cannot be ruled out.

Sources said that according to information available, parts of China are facing severe water crisis and though the Government of China has been assuring India that it would not divert the Brahmaputra, it would not be safe to believe the Chinese blindly and there have also been reports that some channels to the water scarce areas were constructed by the Chinese. Of course, those have not yet been connected to the Brahmaputra, but such a possibility in the days to come cannot be ruled out.

Unfortunately, India is hardly using the water of Brahmaputra to stake claim under the provisions of the international water users’ rights to prevent China from diverting water of the river. Sources pointed out that as per international laws, the water users’ rights of the low riparian countries must be protected but as India has hardly been using water of Brahmaputra, nothing can stop China from diverting its water.

Sources revealed that the Committee of Secretaries of the Government of India, which is chaired by the Cabinet Secretary, has been discussing the issue since 2006 and though the Committee is of the view that India must make optimum use of the water of Brahmaputra, nothing has come up on the ground so far. The Committee met for the last time in December and at every meeting the issue is being discussed.

Official sources pointed out that so far, different schemes and projects have been taken up on the tributaries of the Brahmaputra, which originated within India itself and such projects would not be enough to deter China from diverting the Brahmaputra. There is urgent need for making optimum use of the Brahmaputra water and the Ministries of Power and Water Resources must take up schemes immediately to prevent any attempt by China to divert Brahmaputra, sources admitted.