Advocate (Dr.) Prashant Mali's Blog

To the layman, a chip may be just a chip but its utility is more than just making your smartphone work. Even screens, external slots, camera and other attachments have enough hardware capability on them to act as potential hack vectors. There have been multiple researches on this point that a simple chip replacement or addition can compromise your smartphone significantly. The major source of such hacks have undoubtedly been the mobile repair centers. More so in India than anywhere else, there is a workaround presented for any hardware glitch. Glitches that the manufacturers themselves never claim to fix. Your iPhone charging port goes wrong; the authorized service centers only offer to replace the phone at a staggering cost whereas a local market guy will replace the charging port for $10.  The source of these replacement parts are unknown, all the repair centers know is that they get it without any branding or packaging but they have good results. In what researchers are calling ...

Landmark Decision for Online Marketplaces: Online buyers can register a case on sellers anywhere in India. By Prashant Mali        Spicejet Ltd Vs Ranju Aery       The issue of jurisdiction has made a lot of people sweat in the recent past since the Internet has come into play. With the nation recognizing different forms of businesses that are Internet-dependent, the law has definitely had some catching up to do. I have personally utilized this independence day holiday to research all important legislation and case law in this matter and through this blog, I would like to make my research available for everyone to study. As a practicing Ecommerce Lawyer and Cyber thought leader of the country, I feel that this recent decision of Supreme Court dated  4th August 2017  in the case of Spicejet Ltd is  krantikari  or as it is referred to in Law, a landmark decision. As per the case law deduced from th...

Judgement Dowload link A  Judicial Magistrate  in Puri today sentenced a man to six years of imprisonment in a cyber pornography (A revenge Porn) case, stated to be the first such case. Puri Sub-Divisional Judicial Magistrate Shibasis Giri also slapped a Rs-9,000 fine on the convict, Jayanta Kumar Das an alleged RTI activist, A fake profile was created by the accused in the name of the victim woman from Puri Township in a pornographic site, who then had uploaded the woman’s name, address, photo and phone number on a pornographic website in 2012 to take revenge against her husband. After her personal info was posed on the site, the victim started receiving calls from numerous persons enquiring about her interest in paid sex and wife swapping. The husband of the woman, a local journalist, had written about several cases involving the convict. The crime branch had arrested Das on September 18, 2012, following a complaint filed by the victim in July.He was...

What do we mean by a “right of privacy” in India? Justice Cooley in 1888 defined it simply as a right to be left alone. Alternatively, it may be defined as a right to be anonymous. The two definitions are quite different but both are important, and the right to be anonymous is a form of privacy that has particularly significant implications in cyberspace. In legal terms, our right of privacy amounts to a right to be free from government intrusion into certain areas of our lives and a right to be free from intrusion by other individuals into our “private” lives. The former is protected largely through Constitutional interpretation and a number of statutes; the latter is protected largely through the common law under tort principles. Before 1890 no English or American court had ever granted relief based on such a claim as “invasion of privacy.”  However, in 1890 a Harvard Law Review article by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis examined a number of cases ostensibly decided on othe...

Why does India need a Data Protection Law? Apart from appeasing European Union for sharing data with Indian companies, One of the reason is presently all Data of ours -Search, Emails, Chats of Google, FB, Hotmail, Whatsapp are stored in Californian Servers, USA Jurisdiction. US Foriegn Intelligence Survivelenace Court (FISA) with a single penstroke court gag order can take all Indian MPs, PMO, Home Minister,MEA's etc Email data and Analyse them for leverage in Intl' Affairs, Thats a severe Threat, #privacy intrusion.  Not to mention even the Locations of each Citizen,Official in India can be monitored by US NSA analysts as of now with #Whatsapp, Android Phones relaying data back to USA servers.  Hence a Data Protection Law in India is a need of the Hour. " How to turn Android Phone or Tablet into a Server " .You can check it out here -  https://joyofandroid.com/use-old-android-phone-as-server/

Ransom-payers are also the cause of ransomware proliferation: Prashant Mali The ransom to retrieve files was reportedly $300, to be paid in virtual currency bitcoins Nikita Puri   July 1, 2017 Last Updated at 21:20 IST Operations at a terminal of the country’s largest container port,  Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust  in Mumbai, came to a standstill earlier this week. The process of loading and unloading containers was halted as the port’s computers shut down after a major  cyber attack  that swept across the globe. The aggressiveness of the malware showed that such attacks were capable of bringing both corporate and government networks to a sudden halt. The ransom to retrieve files was reportedly $300, to be paid in virtual currency bitcoins.  Cyber law  expert  Prashant Mali , also an advocate at the Bombay High Court, tells  Nikita Puri  how to prevent mass-scale civil disruptions that future cyber attacks can result in...

Petya/Petwrap ransomware What is Petya Ransomeware do? Ans:  Ransomware, Petya does not encrypt files on a targeted system one by one. Instead, Petya reboots victims computers and encrypts the hard drive's master file table (MFT) and rendering the master boot record (MBR) inoperable, restricting access to the full system by seizing information about file names, sizes, and location on the physical disk. Petya replaces the computer's MBR with its own malicious code that displays the ransom note and leaves computers unable to boot. Why it spreads fast? Ans : Petya ransomware successful in spreading because it combines both a client-side attack (CVE-2017-0199) and a network based threat (MS17-010) So patch both first! Affected countries: UK, Ukraine, India, the Netherlands, Spain, Denmark, and others Behavior: Encrypts MFT (Master File Tree) tables for NTFS partitions and overwrites the MBR (Master Boot Record) with a custom bootloader that s...