How Harshana and Janith who hacked President Website were cornered!
Two young people have been taken into custody by now over the incident of having gained illegal access to President Maithripala Sirisena's official website. After they were questioned in this connection a host of information
relevant to the incident has been exposed.The arrested 17 year old youth in fact is a schoolboy studying in the Maths stream at Ranabima Royal College, Kandy and was following his Advanced Level. Even prior to this he had gained illegal access to 7 other websites, he had admitted. The second suspect who has been apprehended is a graphic artiste having been identified as the individual who has provided technical advice in this respect. He is 27 year old Karunanayakage Janith Madhusanka, a resident of Katubedda, Moratuwa.
The schoolboy who is involved has been taken into custody for having issued a threatening announcement asking that the GCE Advanced Level Examination be not held in the month of April, to give ear to demands of university students, that the government would have to face a cyber war if not able to take precautions in that respect and in such a case for the President to tender his resignation. The schoolboy has on a number of occasions resorted to hacking the President's Website which actions warrant punishment under clause 3,4,5,6,7,8 and 9 of the Computer Crime Laws of No. 14, 2007. Under such conditions he was later produced before courts and detained at Makola Detention House while the 27 year old young man was remanded under orders of Colombo Chief Magistrate Mr. Gihan Pilapitiya.
Apart from this, the Criminal Investigation Department has forwarded a 'B' Report implying that information has been revealed that these two suspects have committed this offence with collaboration of foreign suspects too. A number of IP numbers have been utilised from overseas for this hacker attack; but since one number had been used in this country by mistake, it was possible to arrest the two of them on surveys conducted across that data. The police say that they were able to identify the Facebook Group Account known as Arrow lk which has been maintained by the two suspects which in fact provides the opportunity of changing the data after intruding over 37 websites in Sri Lanka. Further, in addition to that account they had been involved in exchanging relevant information to launch hacking operations on the website forum known as Yakadaya Forum. They had also been engaged in discussions about gaining unauthorized access to websites across the internet while in the process maintaining other Facebook data pages as well as some websites such as Rathu Ukussa, Sumedha Janavijaya and Koyahacker.
The schoolboy who is one of the suspects in this incident has gained access to 7 websites in this manner and involved in acts of distortion of information. While involved in Advanced Level studies in school, he had even tried his hand at a business by the name of Harshana Graphics across the internet and thus was making money by attending to various scripts and graphic work. These two young men had got to know each other through a global forum, subsequent to which they had discussed over the telephone and finally embarked on the operation of hacking the President's Website as to how it could be done in a strategical way after which they had carried out their plans. They were nabbed by the police even before 48 hours elapsed simply because they had made a blunder in one IP address.