NEW DELHI, JULY 20: On July 15 when Dr Neela Mukherjee logged in to the Internet, she found a message from Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL) advising her to change her password. Her account had been broken into. By then, she had lost nearly 45 hours of Internet time. But what angers her is the police inability to help her register even a First Information Report (FIR) against the hackers.Dr Mukherjee, a development consultant attached to United Nations Operation for Project Service (UNOPS), Kuala Lumpur, was just another amateur Internet user till three days ago. Now she is a veritable expert. Running from the VSNL office and the local police station in an attempt to bring the guilty to book, she has discovered that there is no system of redressal.Even more shocking news was to follow. VSNL unofficially gave her the numbers of the hackers. While one of them belongs to a senior bureaucrat in the Department of Telecom (DoT), another number has been traced to the police exchange.``There are also twosmall-time users. The police have registered a complaint but say they can't register an FIR as they do not know what sections to book them under,'' fumed Dr Mukherjee.Sub-Inspector Surinder Sharma at Chittaranjan Park Police Station says: ``What section should we book them under - cheating, theft or fraud? This is the first time that such a case has been reported. None of the conventional laws apply here. We don't even know whether the case should be registered in our police station or the one in the area where the VSNL office is located.''Sharma says, that at the instance of Dr Mukherjee, he called up all the four people, whose numbers were provided by a helpful official at VSNL. ``They are denying any knowledge of this. The DoT bureaucrat said it could be a cross-connection or a technical fault. Similarly, at the police exchange number that we dialled, they said they had 10 lines and there was no way they could trace the hacker. At the other two numbers, people concerned denied any knowledge of it,''explained Sharma.Dr Mukherjee says that initially, the bureaucrat's daughter admitted that it could have been done by her brother, who is a whiz at computers and is soon going abroad for higher studies in computers. They even offered to compensate her for her loss, she says. But after she went to the police, they denied everything and said that they would take up the matter with VSNL on their own.Dr Mukherjee has already lost 52 hours of Internet time to these hackers. ``VSNL sends an alert message if your account is being used for more than five hours at a stretch. After receiving the message, I changed my password but I still lost eight more hours to the same hackers. And now VSNL officials say I should be careful, because hackers can block my site and download all my stuff,'' she says.Dr Mukherjee, who is completely at sea, wonders who to approach for help. She has already dashed-off e-mails to all senior functionaries at VSNL, including its chairman, and has also sent her complaint to theCommissioner of Police.Police officials who are equally nonplussed, say they will get in touch with the prosecution department, to find out whether they can register a case and if so under what sections. They will also ask VSNL to provide these numbers to them officially, so that investigations can be carried out.
