Case on Bandwidth Theft booked under IPC
In
an interesting case reported from Gurgaon,
it is alleged that one BPO namely PCLIT had illegally tapped into the lease
line of Amtek BPO causing a huge
bill to be raised on Amtek. The
company rightfully filed a complaint and the Police have registered a case
under Section 420 and Section 379 of IPC.
We
may recall that it was the Gurgaon
Police who were once an object of criticism by a Company Acme
Telepower that they did not
understand Cyber Crimes and hence
the company would shift its operations to Australia. In this case the Police
have used some common intelligence to check the illegal use of bandwidth by
PCLIT and proceeded to file a case. However, it may be noted that they have
recorded the primary offence under Section 379 for theft which applies for
"Theft of Movables". It is not clear why they ignored the booking of case
under ITA 2008 which was more appropriate.
At
the same time, before jumping to conclusions, it is necessary for the
investigations to be continued to find out if the illegal tapping was a result
of a malicious attempt by PCLIT to wrongfully enrich itself or it was an
accidental cross switching of Cables either by the Company or the external
service providers.
In the event the mistake was
that of the external cabling agency, then they would carry the vicarious
liability for the issue.
While it is not difficult for the two neighboring
BPOs to settle their dispute
regarding the bandwidth bill, both will now realise that the incident also
reflects a failure of the Information Security. It is now necessary for both
companies to establish that the cross switching did not result in compromise
of data of either companies with the other.
God forbid if either of the
Companies work in the HIPAA space. Then this would be ca classical case of
"Data Breach" by a business associate under the HITECH Act and the
consequences would be much larger than the bandwidth costs involved in the
dispute.
This is an interesting case to
watch.
NaaviMay 9, 2010
Related Article:
Related Article in Techgoss
Related Article on Acme Telepower
Comments are Welcome at
naavi@vsnl.com
