Project India Cracked

Last database update - 2002-10-05 00:44:02 GMT - 5:30

Occasional updates (posted at 9:24:44: 17/3/2003 GMT+8)
Even though PIC has been shutdown, occasionally when I come across, interesting news about cyber crime in Indian context, I have been emailing the Defacement Commentary mailing list. So, if you want to be kept in the loop, please subscribe. I will not update this page with the news. You can browse the archives to get an idea of the news I consider worthy of attention.

Continuing PIC's effort (posted at 9:44:49: 15/12/2002 GMT+8)
Anubhav Kalia of FlawFider has emailed me telling me that they will be continuing with the work done at PIC. So, if you have been following PIC and still want to be kept updated about the activities, visit their site.

'Analysis of Defacement of Indian Web Sites' online (posted at 7:10:14: 13/12/2002 GMT+8)
My paper titled Analysis of Defacement of Indian Web Sites is online at First Monday. Any feedback would be appreciated.

The End (posted at 14:14:53: 11/12/2002 GMT+8)
Today I performed the last database update of PIC. No more updates will undertaken from today. Even though I did say that PIC will retire only on 31st December, I will be very busy the next week and after that I will be in India. So, there it is, the end of PIC. Alldas.org is down (has been for some time), hence I have not been able to update the 2002 worldwide defacement graph. The 2002 Indian defacement graph has been updated.

On a related note, First Monday will be publishing my paper Analysis of the Defacement of Indian Web Sites in their volume 7, Issue 12. It is not online right now, but will soon be available.I consider that as a crisp summation of PIC's results.

Indian police turning to crackers? (posted at 17:24:21: 28/11/2002 GMT+8)
An article discusses the use of crackers by Mumbai police to track shady money flow and contain system compromise. One can get a clue as to how clueless the reporting is by reading the single heading "Hacker turns cracker"!

Project India Cracked to close (posted at 17:23:05: 28/11/2002 GMT+8)
Project India Cracked (PIC) will will no longer be maintained starting 1st January 2003. All the contents that are present as of 31st December 2002 will remain online, except that the site will no longer be updated with new information.

PIC was born on 28thApril 2000 and has been online for the last 3 years, and as of now, contains over 800 defacement alerts.

What started as a hobby has become a chore and I have lagged a couple of times in updating the site. It is better to give PIC an 'honorable death' that let it turn into a ghost of a website.

Thanks to all of you people who have in one way or the other helped me along. Special thanks to Ravi V Prasad for helping me run the show from time to time and spreading the word about PIC.

When I started PIC, the aim was to create awarness about sustained attacks against Indian website by cracker groups. I guess PIC has achieved that, at least partially.

Mass defacement by ISOTK (posted at 16:24:51: 18/9/2002 GMT+8)
The group ISOTKM seems to have struck a gold mine. It defaced 17 websites on the 15th of this month, all hosted on the IP address 202.46.200.218, belonging to Versatile.co.in.

WFD defaces prominent websites (posted at 16:19:27: 18/9/2002 GMT+8)
The group WFD has defaced 5 sites related, 3 of which can be considered high profile. This includes the website of Loyola School, Jamshedpur, ONGC India and Andhra Pradesh Techonological Development and Promotional Centre.



Reacting to the defacement, Daniel George, administrator of APTDC is reported to have said "we blocked the website for the next 48 hours as a precautionary measure. We are changing password and the website address"! Wow.. defacement, self inflicted denial of service and donation to Network Solutions. Could anyone please explain to me why APTDC is planning to "change website address"? Wouldn't it be better to shift from Windows 2002/IIS 5.0 to something more secure like Linux/Apache?

Outage - Resolved! (posted at 10:32:03: 7/9/2002 GMT+8)
Srijith.Net (and hence PIC) suffered an outage for a couple of hours because of some misunderstanding with the billing department of the hosting provider. It has been resolved and the site is back online. It was not the case of any attack against the site.

Corrections in the statistics page (posted at 19:11:01: 5/9/2002 GMT+8)
A couple of corrections have been made at the statistics page of PIC. So, if you had found the stats a bit odd earlier, the corrections should put you at ease.

9 AirTel websites defaced (posted at 8:18:48: 25/8/2002 GMT+8)
9 websites belonging to AirTel India was defaced by Anti India Crew (AIC) on 24th August. Each of the defaced sites carried the same content accusing India of Human Rights violations.

According to Netcraft, all the machines seems to be running Apache 1.3.26 (the latest in the 1.x series).

"Pakistan steps up cyber attacks against India" (posted at 10:10:30: 16/8/2002 GMT+8)
Hindustan Times, in its August 4th issue carried an article titled Pakistan steps up cyber attacks against India. Ofcourse none of this is news to people who have been visiting PIC!

Industrial Investment Bank of India website defaced (posted at 7:49:12: 16/8/2002 GMT+8)
The Industrial Investment Bank of India Ltd website was defaced by the group Anti India Crew (AIC). The site was still in the defaced state when this report was being filed.

Defacement Notice mails back on track (posted at 11:57:29: 15/8/2002 GMT+8)
For the last couple of months, the defacement-notice mails were not being sent at all. I had disabled this feature because a glitch in the codes I had written was sending the wrong notices. This has now been fixed. Those who have subscribed to the mailing list should have got their first set of email by now.

NDSA "clarifies" (posted at 8:32:31: 4/8/2002 GMT+8)
I got an email from NDSA (National Data Security Agency of Pakistan), that said "for ur info mr we got those pass words off an infected lame indian users who some how got infected to our mass trojans still dun beleive it awwww". I guess they are talking about the news item in which I had questioned the validity of the defacement of indian-army.org. See the story indian-army.org "defaced".

They go on to say that they have defaced the website www.budia.net. It sure is in defaced state, but I am not going to add it to mirror until either zone-h.com or alldas.org takes the defacement first, and I get a peep at the Whois too!