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Indian Techie Strong Armed By Israeli Firm For Exposing Airtel’s Spy Tactics
On Jun 8 an Indian coder known as Thejesh GN on Twitter received a cease-and-desist order by an Israeli firm Flash Networks ltd. a company based out of Herzliya, Israel, via their attorneys in Mumbai. Thejesh was being targeted for exposing the Israeli company for malpractice. He found that the company had been spying and collecting personal data and browsing information and selling it to Airtel India.
Airtell 3G is injecting javascript into your browsing session https://t.co/QHPpSKinve
— Thejesh GN (@thej) June 3, 2015On June Thejesh posted some screenshots and explained how the Airtel 3G network was inserting some extra lines of code into his browser every time he visited a website.
A brief inspection revealed that the code comprised a few lines of JavaScript that loaded an asset, like an advertisement on webpages that Thejesh was visiting. It was called Anchor.js.
Thejesh used a web-based IP tracker and found out that the code was originating out of the IP address 223.224.131.144 - which belongs to Bharti Airtel Limited.
JavaScript injection is a very clumsy way to add extra functionality to certain programs. If users are not notified first, the injection of JavaScript can be construed as malicious. It is therefore fair that Thejesh decided to post this and other information on GitHub - a platform for developers to warn other users of malicious content, viruses or other such problems on the web.
