Ankit Fadia

Indian author and speaker

A number of his claims regarding his achievements have been disputed by others within the security industry, and he was mocked with a "Security Charlatan of the Year" award at DEF CON 20 in 2012. His claims of hacking feats have since been discredited by many magazines.

At the age of 10, his parents gifted him a computer and he says he started taking an interest in hacking after a year of playing video games when he read a newspaper article on the subject. He soon started a website hackingtruths. box. sk where he wrote hacking tutorials, which acquired many readers and encouraged him to write a book. The book received favourable responses in India, making Fadia popular in the country, and turned his hobby into a full time profession. In addition, he started providing his own computer security courses, such as the "Ankit Fadia Certified Ethical Hacker" programme. In 2009, Fadia stated that he was working in New York as an Internet security expert for "prestigious companies". Fadia also endorsed the Flying Machine jeans brand of Arvind Mills. Fadia was dismissed by security and cryptography enthusiasts as a 'faker' making tall claims, who attributed his success to the tech illiterate media. A security professional, who uses the handle @FakeAnkitFadia on Twitter, told The Sunday Guardian, "The first book that Fadia 'wrote' at the age of 14, The Unofficial Guide to Ethical Hacking, was a little over 32% plagiarised from other security publications and websites." Fadia has dismissed the critics who question his credibility as an expert, saying "If I had been fake, my growth would have stopped 10 years ago".

In 2002, Fadia claimed that at the age of 17, he had defaced the website of an Indian magazine. In 2012, the Forbes India executive editor Charles Assisi (who was editor of CHIP India at the time of the supposed incident), denied that such an incident ever took place after verifying with his predecessor and successor at the magazine as well. In a 2002 interview published on rediff. com, he stated that at the age of 16, he foiled an attempt by the Kashmiri separatist hackers to deface an Indian website. He did not divulge the name of the organization he worked for, citing security reasons. AIC also announced that it would be defacing the website of the CBEC within the next two days, and challenged Fadia to prevent it by patching the vulnerability but Fadia couldn't. In 2003, he claimed to have infiltrated a group of hackers and stated that the Pakistani intelligence agencies were paying "westerners" to deface Indian websites with anti India or pro Pakistan content. In 2012, his website was defaced twice by hackers. In the first instance, the hackers rubbished his claims and stated that he was fooling people. Another hacker compromised it in response to a challenge that was issued by Fadia on the Tech Toyz show on CNBC TV18. In 2012, DEF CON awarded him with the "Security Charlatan of the Year" award citing him to be a fraudster and his presentations outdated. The website attrition. org mentions him as a security charlatan and accuses him of plagiarism in his work. During September 2015, his official Facebook page posted a certificate which claimed that Fadia was appointed as the brand ambassador for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's pet project, the Digital India Initiative. The government had then announced that it would pluck out young tech entrepreneurs to be its brand ambassadors which included the ilk of Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal of Flipkart, Snapdeal's Kunal Bahl and Micromax's Rahul Sharma. According to a report in India Today, government sources said there is "No such move to appoint a brand ambassador as reported".