
Is housing.com hacked/down? India's Leading Startup - illuminek
https://housing.com/
======
anant90
If nothing else, the level of immaturity of conduct by housing.com's ex-CEO
and his followers within the company is definitely hurting the burgeoning
startup scene in India real bad. To make matters worse, this comes at a time
when foreign VC firms/banks were only starting to get comfortable investing
sizable amounts of money in Indian startups at a pre-profitability stage. My
only hope is that the people in the tech community world over do not
stereotype Indian startups to this one bad apple, and up and coming Indian
entrepreneurs do not assume this is acceptable and normal.

~~~
illuminek
I am surprised to see, that people are not able to redirect it to some decent
maintenance page. What could have gone wrong at tech?

~~~
anant90
It pretty much looks like an inside job.

Surprising bit lies in some engineers working on the infra thinking it's cool
to deface the company's site to show support for their fired CEO.

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rokhayakebe
Perhaps some users are unhappy with this:

[https://www.techinasia.com/india-housing-ceo-released-by-
boa...](https://www.techinasia.com/india-housing-ceo-released-by-board/)
[http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/01/rahul-yadav-fired-as-
housin...](http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/01/rahul-yadav-fired-as-housing-com-
ceo/)

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HappyTypist
The sysadmins need to change the DNS to point to a status page, perform
forensic dumps of the servers, and perform incident response 101 ASAP. There's
no excuse leaving an attacker controlled message up for hours.

~~~
illuminek
True. They seems helpless.

~~~
namecast
Or complicit. The message posted sounds like a plea to return the recently
departed CEO to power, or am I misreading it?

~~~
deskamess
Reading that I got a vibe of a "cry/message from the inside".

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sidcool
Yes, I am getting this as the page:
[http://i.imgur.com/Z0E2RVG.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/Z0E2RVG.jpg)

~~~
cpayne624
eek. plug in your laptop man!

~~~
sidcool
:)

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pratnala
I suspect this is an inside job of some of the employees

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ishanr
its not india's leading startup.

~~~
simonswords82
What is then?

Edit: Thanks for the feedback, I didn't know some of these (like VWO) were of
Indian origin.

~~~
amalantony06
In addition to what linux_devil has mentioned, on the enterprise side there is
Plivo, HackerRank, FreshDesk, Helpshift, Druva, RecruiterBox, Webengage,
VisualWebsiteOptimizer etc.

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boulevard
It is back up again. But was surely done by some insider who supports the ex-
CEO.

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ebinjohn
Now it's time. There is a new website up and running, you guys wanna check it
out. [http://housing.ceo/](http://housing.ceo/)

~~~
dylanjermiah
Skeptical if that is actually him, his prior actions do indicate it's
possible.

~~~
ebinjohn
True that.

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illuminek
Is this the maintenance page or has it been hacked?

~~~
bhoomitv
[https://twitter.com/expresstechie/status/618010135181422592](https://twitter.com/expresstechie/status/618010135181422592)

~~~
illuminek
Recent events @ housing.com look like a movie.

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illuminek
If I am not wrong then there was a townhall meeting going on @ Mumbai
headquarters when it all happened.

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codeN
Interesting that there is no HTML just a direct link to an image.

------
illuminek
Down again. For sure someone is playing with it.

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linux_devil
very sad day for housing, I mean some scaling issues are fine but deface is
catastrophic . Good luck to housing

------
ebinjohn
It's even down at 5:20 PM IST

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illuminek
It is backup again now.

~~~
sangupta
Still down at 6:00PM IST.

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noipv4
Steve Jobs lite

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LaFolle
Its more than an hour and still down!

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zaidf
This may be an unpopular opinion but I think Rahul Yadav was made a scapegoat
for all the VCs who put in too much money into housing at too high of a
valuation. Yadav has his flaws -- but they are mostly childish, not evil. He
gave the so-called adults a perfect excuse to hide behind but it still doesn't
excuse the Board for their key decisions related to scaling, burn etc.

As for Rahul Yadav, I think he would have done well to find a person he really
respects and to listen to him. Zuck did that with Andressen(no, I'm not saying
he's Zuck; just that having a close mentor can really make a massive
difference.) The Board could have helped here in lightly nudging him to find
that somebody instead of engaging in constant confrontation.

