Indian banks flawed, have been hacked several times: Legion

Legion has reportedly hacked into Indian financial institutions several times in the past

Aside from consuming copious amount of drugs, next on the agenda of hacker group 'Legion', which recently hacked into the official Twitter handles of Vijay Mallya, Rahul Gandhi, Barkha Dutt and Ravish Kumar, is to target sansad.nic.in, which provides email services to government employees, and former IPL boss Lalit Modi. 

In an encrypted chat interview with FactorDaily, Legion reportedly said: “Next is a dump of sansad-.nic.in emails. Which is — quite big. It includes a lot of _BIG FISH_". While posting from one the Twitter handles they had hacked, the group also named Lalit Modi as an intended target. 

In another conversation with Economic Times,  Legion said the Indian banking system is "deeply flawed" and has been hacked several times. According to the report, Legion even revealed the financial institutions that have been hacked by them but ET refrained from publishing their names. 

  Legion has reportedly been pulling off hacks for ten years and have also been wanted by multiple international agencies.

 

Political motives?

Despite having hacked Rahul Gandhi's account, the group, reportedly, does not have any political motives. The member interviewed by the Washington Post added that Legion wasn't even interested in “political data” until a few weeks ago. The group describes itself as "anarchist".

The FactorDaily reporter specifically asked the group's member as to why they had not targeted any leaders or individuals affiliated to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The member made it clear that the group had no particular sympathy for the ruling party in India. "We will own them (BJP) too, when the time is right," said the member. 

The data picks the targets for them

While speaking to the Washington Post, the group's member said that they were in possession of vast amounts, allegedly in the terabytes, of raw data and that the group had been sorting out data regarding public figures in the country. The member said that the "data was choosing the targets for them". 

The member claimed that the group would soon dump data from an email provider soon, which had over 50,000 corporate clients. Further, the member claimed to have access to private hospital chain Apollo's servers. 

The group is certainly capable of acquiring sensitive personal data. After hacking Mallya's Twitter handle, the group posted the liquor baron's email addresses and corresponding passwords. The group further claimed to have information about his assets across various banks. After hacking NDTV journalist Barkha Dutt's account, the group posted a link to a "partial" data dump of approximately 1.2 gigabytes of Dutt's emails. 
 

Twitter, the group claimed, is particularly vulnerable to them. In an interview to mashable.com, one of the group's members claimed that they have a bypass for Twitter's two-factor authentication required to get access to an account. "In the hacks in the past weeks, nothing was abused except Twitter's password reset functionality," the member said. 

"There is no zero-day vulnerability in Twitter currently being exploited by us," the hacker added.

Drugs, and more drugs

But, what drives these hackers? According to a member, or members, of the group interviewed by the Washington Post and FactorDaily, consuming drugs seems to be a major preoccupation for the hackers. 

When the reporter from FactorDaily asked the alleged member of the group what their endgame was, the answer was: "Die from an overdose of LSD combined with DMT on the peaky ranges of the himalayas." LSD, or Lysergic acid diethylamide, colloquially called 'acid', is a psychedelic drug, while DMT, or N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, is another powerful psychedelic compound. The member interviewed by FactorDaily was also pleased at being described as a "pothead" (a consumer of cannabis), although the member lamented the fact that they (the members of Legion) did not partake as much as they used to. 

Across interactions with reporters and media houses, members of the group have not been shy in broadcasting their usage of such substances. While speaking to the Washington Post, one of the group's members began the interview by telling the reporter about the "big joint" - made out of "OG", or really strong marijuana called Orangutan Ganja, and hashish - being smoked on the other end while the interaction took place. 

They also seem to have a peculiar obsession with dying from an overdose. One of the group's hackers told FactorDaily that the drugs would probably kill him or her, and probably the other members, before the authorities could get to them. 

How do they view themselves?

To put it simply, they are not modest. The Washington Post described the interviewed member's, and by extrapolation the group's, attitude as "a sort of technological superiority complex". Speaking to FactorDaily, the group's member claimed that they  had enough money and skills to "own any corporation". 

And if that member is to be believed, they are not particularly worried about being caught by the authorities any time soon. Also, the group seems to like to describe itself as a collective of "superior cyber criminals". 

However, they do appear to see themselves as dashing criminals, and they are not shy of the "criminal" part. We are a bunch of computer geeks addicted to crime, and predictably, drugs, claimed the member interviewed by the Post.