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India: Twitter hackers criticize banking system as ‘deeply flawed’

A HACKER group in the headlines for targeting Twitter accounts of prominent Indians has rubbished the government’s push for a cashless economy saying the banking system is “deeply flawed”.

The group calling itself ‘Legion’ made the news over the last couple of weeks after hacking the Twitter accounts of opposition leader Rahul Gandhi’s Twitter and his Indian National Congress party’s official account. This was followed by hacks of liquor baron Vijay Mallya and journalists Barkha Dutt and Ravish Kumar, as well as news channel NDTV.

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In an interview over a secure chat platform with The Washington Post yesterday a member of the group claimed that they were in possession of terabytes of raw data, including gigabytes relevant to Indian public figures.

According to Factor Daily, the group said the Indian banking system would be easy for hackers to exploit and claimed the group holds encryption keys and security certificates that would allow them to do so, though they said they wouldn’t.

“Let me tell you…the banking system of India is deeply flawed and has been hacked several times,” an unnamed hacker representing the group told The Economic Times today. “We don’t believe in a cashless economy at all, you need cash, you need cash, that’s how things are, sorry mate.”

The unnamed told Factor Daily that the group doesn’t support any centralized form of banking and would only support Digital India if it was based on the cryptocurrency Bitcoin.

They also revealed that the group’s next move would be to carry out a large data dump of emails from sansad.nic.in, which provides email services to government employees.