The hacker was based in Bangalore but had broke into the account from Mumbai by using a student server to send the mail. Kumar made this announcement at a customer meet organised here yesterday. However, he did not disclose the name of the account holder. VSNL was able to track the hacker the next day.

This was possible due to the tracing system installed in Mumbai where the company can trace back the calling number. This systems is already working in Mumbai and will start from Delhi also.

Citing this incident as a "freak" one, Kumar said that VSNL would not in any way be affected by this incident."It was impossible to stop these kind of incidents but the monitoring wouldcontinue through the tracing system. The Shell Access has many security concerns and we would be gradually phasing this out, Kumar said.