I'm actually more embarrassed about the level of English this guys uses. Majority of the school education here is in English, atleast in the cities. All of engineering/technical education in India is in English. I can expect the odd mistakes since it's not our first language, and the accent being a problem. But to be considered an expert in the field, i would imagine you should have a firm grasp on the language you use to impart unambiguous, highly technical knowledge.
In November 2001, Fadia was consulted by a classified intelligence agency for breaking an encrypted message sent by one of Osama Bin Laden's men. Since then Fadia has been involved in numerous classified projects pertaining to cyber terrorism and crime. In August 2008, Fadia was consulted by the Navi Mumbai Police Department to trace the terror email sent just a few minutes before the Gujarat serial blasts. Fadia was also consulted by the Mumbai Police for decoding VOIP messages in relation to the Mumbai terror attacks.
If this is the state of affairs at the Indian intelligence agencies, perhaps they shouldn't even bother.
"Are we really to believe the U.S. National Security Agency went to a 16 year-old foreign national in India with no published research on encryption to enlist his help decrypting stegonography-hidden messages that used three customized encryption algorithms using just his desktop computer? Absolutely not."
There isn't a lot of context, but the tl;dr is that Attrition.org keeps track of charlatans and plagiarists in the security industry, and Rahul Tyagi is allegedly one of them.
Just did a bit of Googling on Ankit Fadia and Rahul Tyagi.
Damn, are these guys really delusional or are they just good at selling themselves? Not that the Indian media helps - they are incredible at chest-thumping at the most mediocre things.
Its shameful that people like Rahul Tyagi and Ankit Fadia making fool to many organisation and students in India by showing kiddy tricks.
Most surprising part is Ankit is getting business and he is teaching Hacking in some of the university in India.
When I was working for box.sk (so many years ago) a much younger Ankit submitted several articles to neworder.box.sk. Most of them were lifted verbatim from TCP IP Illustrated. He was exposed back then by our staff, but had a huge following of people who believed it really was his original material - people for whom it was easier to parse random internet articles than pick up a volume like TCP/IP Illustrated. The (now a) man has made a life for himself doing this kind of thing.
There's always going to be people like Fadia, and this Rahul. And sadly, there's always going to be people who believe these folks.
This is the way things work in India, unfortunately. People are a bit gullible, and don't bother to do a bit of research. For example, when I was in High School, I noticed that nearly all my classmates used Indian ripoffs of classic science books published in the West, instead of using the original. After a bit of digging, I figured the reason was that these ripoffs explained 'concepts' in an 'organised' manner which could then be memorized
I love the sentence "i did not cross check from net that whether the content was plagiarized or not". Well, no, the content on the net is not plagiarized – the plagiarism is in copy-pasting it.
The strange fact is that Tyagi isn't offended by anything said about his book, he simply plays for time until he receives assurance that his book (and email conversation!) will be featured on Attrition... He will probably add a link saying, "Featured on Attrition!" hoping none of his clients bothers to read it.
Tricky it is indeed. I've opened his twitter profile and apparently he is an Actor, Author, Ethical Hacker, Hardcore Gamer, Motivational Speaker and has 37k followers.
I am an Indian and i don't think they are any kind of whizkid. They are just good at selling themselves to media and today's generation who happen to think they are computer geniuses. Youth here thinks they are huge deal (i have myself heard about Ankit Fadia a number of times in the wild, always in the context "computer problem? contact Ankit Fadia"). I respect their interest in computers but i blame these men completely for their delusional behavior. Either that or they are hired by some more, uhm, typical hackers to cover for their public image. But i don't think my country's intelligence is this sophisticated because as Ankit Fadia's about me page states, our defense people think decrypting emails is the job of a hacker. God forbid they find out stuxnet or Flame and who their makers are. India has technical talent, but other people here tend to overshadow the small intelligent discussions one can expect.
The level of stupidity is really high in the linked conversation.
Seems like this industry is getting overrun by amateurs or simply fakes. My employer paid for CEH course at EC http://www.eccouncil.org/
The material was simple, inaccurate and outdated, aimed at creating script kiddies at best. And yet organisations happily pay thousands of dollars/pounds for this nonsense.
I think anon poster [1] at Quora summarized the course well.
"CEH is crap, don't bother and if you take the CEH cert, never tell anybody, they will laugh at you. It's like telling a trucker that you have a license to drive a moped"
People like this give us Indians a bad name. A (non-technical) friend recently showed me a copy of Ankit Fadia's "email hacking book" and I was shocked to see the quality of material and the things he called "hacking" in that book (connecting to a SMTP server and sending an email with modified headers.) These people need to be exposed for the frauds that they really are.
The media doesn't help in all this either. Reporters, even on technical stories have absolutely no idea what they're writing about, leading to stories like Ankit Fadia and his supposed decryption of messages from Osama Bin-laden.
I agree, there are hundreds of guys in India that are doing a great job advancing the stated of the art - and you'll never hear a peep from any of them.
Ankit and Rahul are just good at talking themselves up. There are plenty of people in InfoSec that excel at marketing themselves.
Worst of all, they are an embarrassment to the intelligence agencies they have purportedly worked for.
I have no doubt in my mind that a graduate beginning her infosec career at the NSA, DSD, GCHQ, RAW, Mossad or other intelligence agency would show a better understanding of fundamental security concepts than these fuddiduddies.
Plagiarism is a common occurrence in India. There is very little original research work in universities and Intellectual Property laws are rarely enforced. Ergo, every two-bit college professor regularly "authors" books to supplement their paltry income. These are mostly marketed to their own students as a way to pass exams, and nobody claims to have done the original research. Guys like Rahul Tyagi and Ankit Fadia just had the chutzpah to believe their own hype. The real worrisome fact is that nobody in Corporate India knows enough about security to call out these charlatans.
What I find most amusing is that many of these self-proclaimed hackers/developers don't get it. You can ask the same question all over again for days only to get off-topic replies. Sadly, most of the ones I dealt with are also based in India.
I don't claim to be a "hacker" but would just like to say that there are smart people here. They are not just as vocal as these people who, as others have said in this thread, are good at selling themselves to the media.
