A few hours later, he had the entire board exam results right in front of him. The data base had about more than 2,00,000 Indian students names, schools, date of birth and their results.
This is how, he had actually hacked into the Indian education system. Just without any fancy report nor a trained team he could just do with in an hour timings with just the URL.
Das seemed totally confused about how easy it was. "I had all the ISC and ICSE results on my very own computer, in a bunch of comma-separated value files," he writes. "It was truly incredible. It was 26 megabytes of pure, magnificent data. An Excel file I could not scroll to the bottom of. Just for kicks, I Ctrl+F'd a few names I knew and what do you know? There they were. Line after line of names, subjects and numbers. It was truly mesmerizing."
An expert says India's cyber security is notoriously weak. For a long time, this has been credited to a lack of cyber expertise. We just do not have enough trained personnel to man the various forays made by the country's institutions into the online world. Calls for advancement and digitalisation are all well and good, but without the required infrastructure, it is a fool's errand.
According to the sources, there are steps being taken to avoid such acts. Just a week ago, the PMO sanctioned Rs.1,000 crore to combat cyber-attacks. The plan will include the setting up of new agencies and coordination cells to improve responses to threats. Besides this, a cyber security policy was announced last month and approved by the Cabinet Committee on Security.