MELBOURNE, 17 March 2022: There is outrage in academic circles and the community after a University of Melbourne webinar on ‘Resisting caste discrimination in the South Asian Australian Diaspora’ on 16 March 2022 evening had a ‘security breach’, with an intruding screen showing pornography for a few minutes with a non-South Asian name. The attendees who were busy with Q and A were stunned by the screen captured by live pornography and subsequently a faith symbol.
Dr. Vikrant Kishore, the academic/filmmaker, made the presentation and finished answering a question from London when the ‘security breach’ took place. A security breach is any incident that results in unauthorized access of data, applications, services, networks and/or devices by bypassing their underlying security mechanisms. A security breach occurs when an individual or an application illegitimately enters a private, confidential, or unauthorized logical IT perimeter says techopedia.
” When I saw the shared screen… I was aghast and could barely grasp that something like that was happening, ” says Dr. Vikrant Kishore.
The webinar was taking place through the University of Melbourne Zoom account and was immediately detected with ‘unwanted guests’ entering the webinar. There were about 30 plus participants and the webinar had to be abruptly terminated.
Surjeet Dhanji, Post-Doctoral Fellow on the Indian Diaspora and Migration, at the webinar says, ” The Melbourne South Asian Studies Group University of Melbourne is a group of laypersons, academics and South Asian researchers who get together monthly to share their research and/or book or journal publications. We had a sizeable group for tonight’s zoom event followed by a Q&A session.
Towards the end, just as a participant from King’s College London was about to ask a question, some unknown persons joined the zoom session and took over the shared screen to post garbage. I decided to terminate the session to prevent this malicious attack. As the session was on the UoM zoom platform, the attack has been duly noted and will be escalated accordingly. Never experienced this over the past seven years! Sad really.”
The suspicion is the ‘security breach’ happened because someone posted the webinar access details on social media.
A participant Madhu M says, ” … when somebody gatecrashed our Zoom meeting this evening they were showing images from porn movies stills and they chose black people’s porn. It just flashes in my eyes that even now they are trying to tell us in a way that this is you and your status, low caste people. It shows their mentality and bullies nature and mindset of being superior. they don’t want to call us equal to them, for them we are still lower caste and our place is still in the society below them. Still, we are struggling to find a respected place in our society. It shows that we have zero value in their eyes.
I must mention that I felt very sad.”
