The weeks starts with some disconcerting news for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as a French hacker claimed via Twitter that his website might have some security issues, leaving it vulnerable to hackers.
The hacker, who goes by the name Elliot Alderson on Twitter, has been constantly monitoring websites of the Indian government, and few private entities. His profile interestingly reads: “Worst nightmare of Oneplus, Wiko, UIDAI, Kimbho, Donald Daters and others.”
According to Alderson, PM Modi’s website was vulnerable enough to let anyone fully access its database. This, apparently was possible by opening the website in a staging subdomain.
Looking at the impact made by the hacker over the past few months, Alderson claimed in a tweet thread that someone from PM Modi’s security team has reached out to him and said they will take care of the issues which were highlighted during the “nice chat” between Alderson and the team behind PM Modi’s website.
And he concluded saying that the team behind the website was able to confirm that the issue was limited to the staging subdomain only, which means the current website server is secure.
Alderson has been highly critical of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) in recent times, suggesting that Aadhaar is riddled with security loopholes and needs expert hands to fix the mess for one of the world’s biggest biometric databases of people.
Back in 2018, the same hacker had a tweet tussle with the chief of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), showing him the lack of security in Aadhaar, and how easy it was for him to get his information from the main database. He even deposited Re 1 into the TRAI chief’s bank account, with the information sourced by him.
Alderson was also active during the launch of Kimbho app by Ramdev’s Patanjali team, pointing out security flaws and he had a heated conversation with the founder of the company making the supposed WhatsApp rival.
He claimed that the app had a lot of security issues, riddled with bugs that will start behaving oddly when it goes out to the public. In the end, the messaging app was finally scrapped because of some security issues.
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