Mumbai: Around six months after the MTNL complained to the cyber crime police ab-out two Tech Mahindra employees, who had alle-gedly tampered with the communication provid-er’s source codes, which led to the breakdown of the MTNL server for four days in July 2017, the police probe is seemingly not going anywhere.
Th-ough the MTNL had provided the source code details to the police, the two suspects are yet to be arrested. Tech Mahindra refused to comment when contacted.
When asked, cyber cell's DCP Akbar Pathan said that no arrests could be made so far as the “probe is still underway”. When contacted, the compl-ainant’s firm MTNL also refused to comment.
According to the complainant, MTNL had given an annual maintenance contract (AMC) to Tech Mahindra from July 1, 2014 to June 30, 2017, and during the time when GST was applicable, had given access of two servers based in MTNL’s Cuffe Parade office to another firm, Silver Touch Technologies, from June 24.
However, when Silver Touch began working from July 1 last year, the servers went through a breakdown from July 15 to July 19, during which MTNL incurred major losses as it was unable to provide data access, SIM replacement, SIM updation facilities to its customers, which also ma-ligned its reputation.
Initially, the company thought that this might be due to some discrepancies in the system and overlooked it for a while. However, over two months later, a senior MTNL official pointed out that the source code was tampered with and wrong directi-ons were given in the system, and subsequently registered a complaint with Cuffe Parade police.
In February, it was revealed in the firewall log of MTNL that when Tech Mahindra’s engineers—Prasanna Salimath and Rajesh Sharma —had visited the servers to make some corrections via the Virtual Private Network (VPN), they had allegedly misdirected the source codes, via three Internet Pro-tocol (IP) addresses, leading to the breakdown of servers for four days (July 15-19). The complainant named the two engineers in February this year, but no arrests have been made by police so far.
