Slashdot Mirror
Indian Telecom Authority Releases a Million Email IDs, Taken Down By Hackers
knwny writes: In a bizarre move that threatens the privacy of over a million internet users in India, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has released the list of email IDs from which it received responses regarding net neutrality. Most of these responses were sent by the general public following a massively popular online campaign to protect Internet neutrality in India. The regulatory body says that it has received large number of comments from the stakeholders on its Consultation paper on "Regulatory Framework for OTT services". So to aid the reading of comments, it has divided them into three blocks — "comments from the service providers," "comments from the service providers' association" and "comments from other stakeholders'"(this includes individuals, organizations, consulting firms etc). In the meantime, the TRAI website remains inaccessible after a DDoS attack by Anonymous India, the hacker collective, apparently in retaliation for the data release.
Back when I was a lad, we knew that an "email address" was like a physical address - useless unless people know it. People even made them publicly available on the web!
Yes, spammers abused this. But hiding addresses hardly helped. So many addresses have been dumped or dictionary brute forced by now it's hardly a big deal if your email address appears in one more place.
So colour me unexcited by this terrible misstep.