The Young Teenager Hacker and The Banning of Cryptocurrency In Nepal

Hello Steemians. Today I am sharing the old hacking incident that occured in my country Nepal in the year 2016.

Craxer Bikash is the leet hacker of Nepal. His real name is Bikash Paudel (in the photo wearing with the mask) and this kid was just 16 years old when he was caught.

First of all before talking about this hacker kid, lets talk about Anonymous Opnep. It is the active hacking group of Nepal that got fame after Nepal was devastated by a huge magnitude of 7.8 richter earthquake on 2015 April 25 Saturday that nearly killed 17000 people and many injured. The government was so corrupted that the relief funds received from many neighbouring countries didn't get properly utilized. They hacked former Prime Minister of Nepal, Baburam Bhattarai's website and President Dr. Rambaran Yadav's website to pressure the Nepali government to quickly resolve the border blockade and the subsequent fuel crisis.

They also hacked Nepal Electricity Authority(NEA) website when Nepalese people were facing long 56 hours loadshedding a week. Today loadshedding has come to end after one of Communist leader Kulman Ghising was given responsibility of that ministry. During his lifetime of job, almost those involved in electricity blackmarketing were arrested. Majority of them were government officials who abused their power. This shows how corrupted Nepalese government are. This anonymous hacker opnep have their own Youtube channel where they leave warning message to Nepal Government. The hackers said that their main motto was to eradicate the corruption from Nepal.

Before Anonymous opnep were famous before, this group gained much more popularity and fame after hacker named Craxer Bikash joined the group. Paudel is one of the two members of the group named Anonymous #opnep and the other one is yet to be identified. Who could have imagined in a country like Nepal where there is low cyber security and poor technology policy, there would be hacker kid like this. He was the one behind most of the hacking done to government websites of Nepal including the one of President of Nepal. Some of the popular websites that he was involved in breaching were websites of prime minister, National Tuberculosis center, Dairy Development Corporation, etc and he had breached over 200+ websites of Nepali Government. He used to leave warning message on the website to secure it otherwise hackers outside will steal valuable data about citizens and everything. But government didn't pay attention to this crime as they were too much corrupted. The hackers were always pointing these security issues so that they would be fixed. This kid never tends to hide his IP although he knows that he could be caught.

As a member of the group Anonymous opnep, on the month of March 2015, he illegally breached into the server of Nepal Telecom, the biggest telecommunication service provider in Nepal and gained access to all the details of telecom users that include citizenship name, mother's name, father’s name, balance in their SIM number as well as other private information which we have to fill up during new SIM registration. Under tha facebook page name Anonymous Nepal, the following statement was released by the hacker.

Nepal is the second country in the world with slow internet connections. Anonymous opnep said that the the security vulnerability has been patched which failed a simple test. On March 22, he was arrested by Metropolitan Police Crime Division, Teku, Kathmandu on behalf of hacking after complaints were registered.

The police report told that devices he used for hacking was Symbian and iOS. The punishment for his crime was for 3 years in jail or he will be fined with Rs 100000. But he was set free by paying fine of 1 lakh nepali rupees according to cyber law Electronic Transaction Act enforeced in 2007. Most of the website he took down where having vulnerabilities related with Sql injection. After being arrested he told police investigators that, "I was influenced by the hacking of Pentagon computers and wanted to test myself if I could hack or not. To my surprise, I could easily get access into the websites of Nepal's government, non-government agencies and I tried to warn them about their vulnerability in system, security holes and nobody care. So I hacked telecom server." Recently he is working online by checking vulnerability in website of other countires. Here is a screenshot of him:

Most of Nepal Government websites once designed are directly uploaded to the hosting server without focusing on website security. Nepal's website are most of the times poorly coded making it easily hackable with tools like sqlmap, Havij, sqlninja. Nepalese governemnt itself don't give a damn in website getting hacked. Nepal is also extremely vulnerable to cyber-attacks and is encountering a high number of malware attacks on a daily basis. The Asia Pacific region is especially vulnerable with emerging markets most at risk of malware threats.

Apart from this, Nepalese governemnt don't like to get acquainted with latest technological inventions and are keeping Nepalese far behind such technology. It is only concerned on sending workforce abroad to get remittance and promoting tourism only. As of now most of the countries have started to legalise the digital currency i.e cryptocurrency, government of NEPAL has officially banned it . On August 13, 2017 Nepal Rastra Bank declared cryptocurrency as illegal. On October 6, 2017 Central Investigation Bureau (CIB) of Nepal Police arrested seven individuals for illegally carrying out bitcoin exchanges in different districts of Nepal.

The reasons are numerous for banning the cryptocurrency. The press released told that country's economy was not stable when Nepalese money was invested in foreign digital currency. But this act was pathetic, they could have regulate these things and monetize these. They made it illegal because they lack technology to track and implement tax on it. Or maybe they wanted to control every foreign currencies. Nepal is missing huge opportunities to be part of global movement. There are lots of big corruption case where they tie their hands and act blind where as on the issues of Bitcoin they arrest people. I am hoping that government will soon realize its importance and legalise it in Nepal.