TRAI mungs 1M email ids to keep hackers at bay

MUMBAI, INDIA: Days after receiving flak from the netizens for releasing their email ids, the Telecome Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), has altered the email ids of all respondents.

It has munged all email addresses to check spammers from automatically copying these IDs. It has changed the email IDs by replacing symbols like @ to (at) and a ‘.’ to (dot).
The address munging is done to make it tedious for spammers or cybercriminals from copying email ID for automatically sending e-mails.

It must be recalled that the authority had received more than 1 million responses to its consultation paper on framework for over-the-top players like Viber, WhatsApp and Net Neutrality.

The authority had made public all stakeholders by making the ids public. A hacker group by the name of Anonymous Hackers had injected the DDoS virus in TRAI’s networking infrastructure, pulling the site down for hours.

Meanwhile, security experts believe that hackers who have access to sophisticated technology can replace the dot and at with the actual characters and trace the email address.

Is the TRAI response too little too late?