Trai in damage control mode on Email row

In a damage control move, the telecom regulator Trai on Wednesday altered email IDs of all stakeholders who responded to its consultation paper on framework for over-the-top players like Viber, WhatsApp and net neutrality.

After facing flak for making public 10 lakh email IDs on its website, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) today resorted to ‘munging’ of all addresses to check spammers from automatically copying these IDs. The address munging is done to make it tedious for spammers or cyber criminals from copying email ID for automatically sending e-mails. In address munging, the email IDs are changed by replacing symbols like @ to (at) and a ‘.’ to (dot).

Trai faced huge criticism after it made public over 10 lakh email addresses of people commented on its paper. This move of Trai was seen as forage for cyber criminals specially spammers. The website of Trai remained inaccessible for several hours for two days after it released all comments on its websites on Monday.

A twitter account claimed that it has brought down website of Trai through a cyber attack known as Distributed Denial of Service in which huge amount of internet traffic is directed towards a website that disables its access. Trai official, however, has said that the website was down following a technical error in system provided by National Informatics Centre.