A Swedish security consultant, Dan Egerstad, has released the passwords of over a 100 e-mail accounts belonging to embassies worldwide including those of India.
To check the authenticity, The Indian Express sent a test mail to the Indian Ambassador in China on her official email ID and, using the password posted online, was able to access it. The email account of the Indian Ambassador to China contained details of a visit by Rajya Sabha member Arjun Sengupta to Beijing earlier this month for an ILO conference. There was also a transcript of a meeting this evening which a senior Indian official had with the Chinese Foreign Minister.
Similarly, accounts of NDA and DRDO officials reveal phone numbers, commercial documents, official correspondence and personal mails. The account of the Indian embassy in Germany contains a query by two IIM (Calcutta) students about safety in the wake of recent racial abuse cases in West Germany.
Egerstad hasn't disclosed any information about how he managed to get this information, but will apparently be happy to help for free if any of the listed organisations contact him.
He sat on the information for a while trying to figure out what to do with it. He says he contacted some of the victims, but got no response, which is what led him to finally post the data. He also says that some Swedish journalists have since contacted all of the embassies whose accounts he exposed online, and that they've been unresponsive for the most part. He knows of only one account in which the password has been changed since he exposed it -- that of the Russian embassy in Sweden.
Sources: Wired, Indian Express,
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