Advocate (Dr.) Prashant Mali's Blog

Indian  Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) on 9th February has arrested the country's first 'darknet' narcotics operative who allegedly shipped hundreds of psychotropic drug parcels abroad in the garb of sex stimulation medicines.  Dipu Singh, 21, son of a retired army officer, was arrested by the sleuths of the Delhi zonal unit of the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) from Lucknow recently.  Darknet refers to the deep hidden internet platform that is used for narcotics sale, exchange of pornographic content and other illegal activities by using the secret alleys of the the onion router (ToR) to stay away from the surveillance of law enforcement agencies. Owing to its end-to-end encryption, darknet is considered very tough to crack when it comes to investigating criminal activities being rendered over it.  Singh was a major player on the darknet. His listings were found in one of the biggest and reliable darknet markets like Empire Market and Majestic Garden. Accused initially us

A Canadian insurance company infected by ransomware virus paid off the cybercriminals using its cyber insurance policy. Their British reinsurers, having to disburse 109.25 Bitcoins, wanted it back from the blackmailing cybercriminals. After infection, the unnamed Canadian company suffered a total lockdown of all of its systems and asked its reinsurance firm to pay the ransom so it could get back on its feet. Paying off blackmailers holding a company to ransom is never advisable, many a time it is against the local law. Despite a negotiation that made criminals bring down their initial demand of $1.2m to $950k, the decryption tool provided had to be run on each and every affected device on the company's network. It took five days to decrypt 20 servers and "10 business days" to unlock 1,000 desktop computers. Neither company was going to pay out and forget the incident. The English reinsurer hired Chainalysis Inc, a "blockchain investigations firm&q

Online Defamation Laws (Criminal) in India With Section 66A of The IT Act,2000 struck down by Hon. Supreme Court of India in Shreya Singhal's Case, victims have left only with options in other laws based on words and actions of the accused online. Section 504 Indian Penal Code- Intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of the peace. (using bad words, curse words like BC, MC, F*ck U e.t.c) “whoever intentionally insults, and thereby gives provocation to any person, intending or knowing it to be likely that such provocation will cause him to break the public peace, or to commit any other offence, shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to two years, or with fine, or with both”. Section 469 of the IPC states that whoever commits forgery, intending that the document or electronic record forged shall harm the reputation of any party, or knowing that it is likely to be used for that purpose shall be punished with impris