Day 67 - MISSED; IIT Delhi's DNS provider got hacked, no post mortem though; Re watching Contagion (2011) and Another Earth (2011)

25 Apr 2017 100daysofwriting · atwood · books · movies

Ah, I have been running two days late now. Right now is 27th April, 1733. This post should have been out on 25th April before I slept. I came down with a bad cold and fever yesterday. So, now I have to manufacture two posts in quick succession. I still have one more exam to give tomorrow. Nah, no big deal!

IIT Delhi’s website got attacked, alongwith a lot of other Indian websites. Now, apparently, it wasn’t the website servers themselves that got hacked but the DNS provider, ERNET that got hacked. And after the DNS providers got hacked, they remained in that state for about 12 hours.

Ironically, on the same day, only a few hours before this fiasco, this article about IIT Delhi using online voting systems for student elections came out. I don’t mean to get into an alma mater war here, but anyone who has designed and built web applications knows that voting systems are rather simple systems to build because the constraints that are applied in the real world are pretty stringent: fixed number of voting booths, constant surveillance of the people coming and voting, validation is done by human beings and not the software. Also, IIT Kharagpur has been using online voting systems for the past 4 years at the very least. Probably, even before that.

The unfortunate part of this is that there won’t be any post mortem of this particular attack. Cloudfare recently got attacked with their weird missing NULL character bug, but they published a detailed post mortem about the attack, when they found out about it, how they mitigated it and all kinds of details. That kind of data reassures users and also helps others prevent similar attacks against them.

I also ended up re-watching two movies that I have watched several times already. I don’t know what I hope to get from watching them again and again, I believe there’s something about the story, the sophistication of the story telling, the subtlety with which the story unfolds and most importantly, the hope that is the underlying driving factor for both stories: Contagion (2011) and Another Earth (2011). Surprisingly, both movies were made in 2011.

On an auxilliary note, Audible got back regarding the main narration on Handmaid’s Tale’s audiobook.

Just a few added scenes. Their customer service response was rather fast, to be honest.

POST #67 is OVER