There is a WhatsApp message in circulation that states

“Breaking News, Amazon Selling Samsung J7 Mobile Phone at Just 499 Rs because of Golden Anniversary. Buy It Now Before Sale Ends. Cash On Delivery Also Available. Visit just now  http://amazon.mobile-flashsale.com/“

This appears to be an attempt to steal contact information and probably a fraud to steal Rs 499/- from some.

Presently Chrome/Google has flagged the site as a “Suspected Phishing Site” and the site is also  blocked by anti virus software .

However it is interesting for the general public to take note of this kind of fraud where the fraudster is riding on a genuine mega sale being promoted by Amazon where discounts upto 50% are being provided on certain items. This fraudulent message however says that the discount is 97% ! and it is for a poplar mobile product. It is possible for many to fall prey to such frauds.

What people should observe is that the domain name starts with “Amazon” but it is only a sub-domain and the main domain is mobile-flashsale.com. If people can recognize this difference, most would be able to identify the fraud.

Now that the website has been blocked by Google itself, the fraud through this domain name may be over. But it may come back in another name again. It is therefore necessary to take some steps to prevent such frauds recurring.

I therefore request the law enforcement agencies to take note of this and try to identify the perpetrator of the fraud and book him for the offences both under ITA 2000/8 and IPC.

The domain name mobile-flashsale.com has been registered by GoDaddy who is the intermediary facilitating the fraud and liable under Section 79 of ITA 2000/8. The website is hosted at cloudfare.com

The registrant noted by GoDaddy is

Mr Anil Kumar, Kanakumari, with a registered mobile number 9886554323 and an email address rv984950@gmail.com.

The sending of the Whats App message, and creating a fraudulent website can be considered as an impersonation/attempted impersonation for commission of/attempt to commit “Cheating” and hence punishable under both ITA2008 and IPC.

I therefore call upon the Police in Kanyakumari to identify this Anil Kumar and prosecute him. It is possible that the e-mail address or the mobile number may be untraceable since wrong addresses might have been provided by the registrant.

In that case the Police needs to book cases against

a) GoDaddy.com

b) Cloudfare.com

c) Google.com

d) The Mobile Service Provider at whom the number 9886554323 is operating. (Vodofone Karnataka) It is possible that this might have been ported from Vodofone Karnataka to some TN service provider in which case Vodofone should provide the new service provider who is handling the current billing for this fraudster.

These intermediaries are guilty of “Negligence” and “Assisting” in the commission of the fraud. They are liable under Section 79 of ITA 2000/8 for lack of due diligence facilitating the fraud.

If any member of the public has suffered loss on account of this crime, they should file a Police Complaint naming these intermediaries as accused and also approach the Adjudicators of their respective states (IT Secretary of the State) to file a complaint under Section 46 of ITA 2008 for recovery of their losses.

Adjudicator of Tamil Nadu can also start a Suo Moto enquiry and direct Police in Kanyakumari to conduct an investigation and report back to him. Once the person is enquired into, the Adjudicator can impose a penalty for a reasonable amount and appropriate it into a fund from which any complainant can be redressed.

This incident should be made into a test case of how the State should respond to such Cyber Frauds. Probably the State administrators will be too busy for such public service and I therefore request public interested advocates to take up the issue and draw the attention of appropriate judicial authorities to take up the issue for prosecuting the fraudster/attempted fraudster alias Anil Kumar.

Naavi

[P.S: If there are any innocent persons by name Anil Kumar particularly in Kanyakumari, kindly excuse me for using the name in this post. I welcome all such people to inform me so that a disclaimer can be put up on this platform stating “I am not that Anil Kumar”.]

The RBI Deputy Governor Mr R Gandhi has confirmed that the recent cyber attack that was reported in Mumbai was on Union Bank of India but no loss might have been reported. Mr Gandhi also reminded the Banks about the new Cyber Security Framework that RBI wanted Banks to implement.

Under this framework, there was a need for Banks to confirm that a gap analysis had been completed and taken note of by the Board before July 31, 2016. Since the deadline has already passed yesterday (given the weekend holidays), it would be interesting to know whether at least one Bank has reported to RBI about the compliance to its compliance requirement. Since his statement is silent on this aspect, it can be presumed that no Bank has so far completed the gap analysis and got the approval of its board and reported it to RBI so far though one or two might have been able to complete the gap analysis at departmental level and kept it ready for presentation to the Board whenever it meets next.

 Now we need to watch out what would be the follow up action of RBI for non compliance of this first level default.

Naavi

In a little surprising but welcome development, the Government of India has released a notification under Section 67C of ITA 2008 viz G.S.R. 711 (E) dated 21st July 2016 titled “Information Technology (Preservation and Retention of Information by Intermediaries Providing Digital Locker Facilities) Rules 2016. which may not perfectly fit under Section 67C but is otherwise related to the setting up of a new regulatory authority called the Digital Locker Authority and defining a new set of business in the Digital India project.

Apparently, the purpose of this notification is to define the rules under which public documents shall be preserved and protected when lodged with the Digilocker authorities and the notification is issued under Section 67C of Information Technology Act 2000/8. It sets a new trend of “Data Retention” defined specific to a domain of activity.

Sec 67C was perhaps meant to define “how long” and in “what form” intermediaries may retain information and “manner” of retention was incidental. However, this notification actually goes to define the “Manner” in which a certain type of intermediary shall retain information without much emphasis on the format and period for which the information has to be retained. Also the “Information” referred to in the Section 67C  of the Act is being used to identify the “Documents” that a subscriber would like to lodge in the safe custody of an agency as an “Uniquely Identifiable Document” with an “URI” (Unique Resource Identifier). No specific structure for the URI like a standard structure for a URL has been defined as part of the “manner of retention of information” under Sec 67C.

It therefore appears that Section 67C has been used as an excuse to define some new business proposition which has its own implications for Digital India. It has redefined Sec 67C itself and altered its scope.

May be we can call this an innovative and creative interpretation of law but the possibilities of unintended consequences that may follow from a loosely regulated service needs to be watched out.

New Opportunities Unleashed

In effect, through this notification, the Government seems to have defined a new business proposition for private sector to develop services to set up and manage “Portal”, “Access Gateways” and “Repositories” to store electronic documents deposited by public and verifiable and retrievable by authorised entities.

The service as conceived is bigger than UIDAI and without a separate Act like the UIDAI Act, it enables a new system by which electronic documents are authenticated, preserved and verified.

Obviously there will be Privacy and Security issues as well to contend with.

Further, since the Main DigiLocker authority would be the Government, the notification provides an admission that its own department may now be considered as an “Intermediary” if it also provides its own digilocker services in addition to private sector players. Such department will therefore be subject to Sec 79 obligations.

To ensure protection of the department as well as avoid conflicts, it may be necessary for Deity to refrain from directly providing the digi locker service as they are dong now and to make the DLA as the regulator like the  Controller of Certifying Authorities which will only restrict itself to regulatory issues and not provide a service of its own. These should have been part of the notification such as “Appointment of a Digital Locker Authority”, but unfortunately they are not released as of now.  We need to wait for the notification  to be issued as a supplementary notification in due course.

The “Digilocker Credentials” which may ultimately be just the log in ID and Password will henceforth become a pointer to the other documents such as Aadhaar, PAN etc held within the Digital Locker and its security would be a key obligation of the service provider since it becomes a proxy to the subscriber’s identity.

Just as the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) is becoming a Universal identification for all financial instruments owned by an individual, this Digi Locker Account may become the universal identity document for an individual.

The Digi Locker service provider would be having a “Digital Locker Practice Statement” similar to the one used by a Certifying Authority for Digital Signature and would be bound by it.

The practice statement  would be a self declaration and only verified by an audit by an independent auditor. Since the Digital Locker Service Provider has to be gazette notified, the practice statement may be subject to an approval process.

The service provider would obviously be open to obligations under Section 43A for reasonable security practice and compliance of all aspects of ITA 2000/8.

At present the qualifications of an Auditor is not defined and I hope it would be determined on a “Ability to Audit basis” and not on a “Qualification Certificate Issued by Preferred entities basis”.

In summary, it appears that the Government through this notification has opened up a new business opportunity which is as responsible as a Licensed Certifying Authority in the case of a Digital Signature issue and the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) without an elaborate legislation. It could be an innovative approach but hopefully not questioned in the Courts for its validity.

The Start Up community may welcome this move as it opens up new opportunities where they can integrate several of their services.

We need to watch out how this notification gets absorbed by the community and harnessed for business.

Naavi

(These are preliminary views and more would follow)

The hacking of a Bangladeshi Bank last February where about $81 million was transferred by fraudsters hacking into the SWIFT Inter Bank money transfer system is a grim reminder of the weaknesses in our Banking eco system.

The detailed account of this heist as explained here, 

The article explains the suspected modus operandi used by hackers to book 35 fraudulent transfers amounting to nearly US$ 1Billion from the Central Bank of Bangladesh to  Federal  Bank of New York. By by some grace of God only 4 of these transactions were carried through and the loss was limited to $81 million. The principle cause could be the compromise of the access credentials of one of the Bank employees with a malware. What compounded the problem was the delays in cross verification arising out of holidays first in Bangladesh and then in New York  exposing the Bank to the huge loss.  Finally what prevented 30 transactions to be held up by the New York Bank was that one of the e-mail addresses contained the word “Jupiter” which was a black listed name of an Iranian Oil Vessel subject to certain sanctions. One transaction failed due to a spelling mistake.

Now a clear 4 months later a similar attack seems to have been repeated on one of the Indian Banks in Mumbai which again by a stroke of luck did not go through.

The incident has been reported in Economic Times here.

This time the US Bank was a little more alert to identify an unusual transaction and the Indian Bank was saved. At this point of time it is not clear which was the Bank involved except that it was a public sector Bank with headquarters in Mumbai. The Economic Times report indicates that the Stock Exchange has not been informed of the attempted fraud which should be considered as a violation of the SEBI norms.

The CERT IN guidelines require that the information regarding such security breaches need to be reported to them and even the latest RBI guidelines mandate reporting of such incidents. However Banks continue to hide the incidents and keep their investors in the dark until one day such frauds blow up on their faces.

One thing however is clear from these incidents that the security systems within the Banks has several short comings and if even the SWIFT transactions are unsafe, one can wonder how safe are the RTGS transactions.

Just like the Banks, customers also should pray for luck to be on their side to protect their funds from fraudsters!

Naavi