Police probe hacker attacks on Melbourne business sites

Melbourne: Shortly after two of the three most dramatic cases of alleged racist attacks on Indians in Australia collapsed dramatically, a series of cyber attacks has put the focus squarely on Indian e-vigilantes.

Police are investigating a four-day series of hacker attacks on Melbourne business sites, with messages saying: "Your server data have been compromised by Ghost Buster and have been encrypted. Stop racial attack [sic] against Indian people. If you don't, then we will be hacking your ****** Australian servers every day."

A few days earlier, Victorian Opposition Leader Ted Baillieu had scoffed at Premier John Brumby's plan to enlist the services of Shane Warne to reassure India.

Simultaneously, the new Premier of neighbouring New South Wales (NSW), Kristina Keneally, confirmed that a state minister would be sent to India to promote NSW as a safe alternate destination for Indian students.

Connections

The rapid developments came just a fortnight after it emerged that three Indian nationals had been taken into custody in connection with the savage killing of fruit picker Ranjodh Singh, 25, outside Griffith, NSW.

Police called the murder "horrific'' and said it appeared that the victim had still been alive when he was set on fire.

The Indian media had earlier been up in arms over claims made by Melbourne man Jaspreet Singh, 29, that he had been attacked by four racist thugs who doused him with petrol before setting him alight.

Last week, Singh faced an out-of-sessions court hearing and was charged with making a false report to police and causing criminal damage with a view to gaining a financial advantage.

The third case is, of course, the unsolved murder of Nitin Garg, the 21-year-old who was the victim of a stabbing in West Footscray on 2 January this year.

Is the violence racially motivated? Not according to two Melbournians who have watched the trend more closely than anyone else.

First to know

Dinesh Malhotra is the founding editor of the Bharat Times, the newspaper for Indian expatriates and the masthead that covered the assaults long before the mainstream media followed suit.

Malhotra said that he believes there are only two cases, out of more than 200 in Victoria, where racism could perhaps be identified as a contributing factor.

The other person is Gautam Gupta, spokesperson of the Federation of Indian Students in Australia. When specifically asked about the assaults, he too stopped short of citing racism as the cause.

— David McMahon is a Melbourne-based journalist.