Sunday, 17 February 2013
Anonymous, a hacker collective, attacked the website of Indian Institute of Planning and Management -- www.iipm.in -- on Saturday morning, forcing it offline.
"#TangoDown iipm.in #IIPMScam. Reason: Got court order to block URLs criticizing them including the UGC (Govt Body) notice," noted a tweet made from @opindia_revenge, a Twitter account used by Indian hackers who claimed to be part of Anonymous. The hackers claimed they brought down 16 websites belonging to IIPM.
The attack on www.iipm.in left www.iipm.edu crippled as this website internally links to the content hosted on www.iipm.in. After the attack, the website was offline for nearly nine hours.
On Thursday the department of telecommunications had asked internet service providers (ISPs) to block 78 URLs (web addresses), of which 73 were linked to articles and blogs about the IIPM and its director, Arindam Chaudhuri. The directive was issued after an order by a Gwalior district court. The list of blocked URLs included a public notice of July 2012 issued by the University Grants Commission saying that "IIPM is not a university within the meaning of section 2(f) of the UGC Act, 1956".
The web users also shared the text of blocked articles and created new URLs to host them. They talked about 'The Streisand Effect', a web phenomenon which notes that harder someone tries to suppress information on the web, the faster it spreads. On Twitter, UGC and IIMP were among the topics that trended in India on Saturday.
