Hacker group Legion warns release of government emails hosted on Sansad.nic.in

After some controversial hacks into Twitter accounts and emails of popular Indian journalists, businessmen and politicians, the latest entrants in hack-town, Legion, has said that it will be releasing new data containing emails hosted on the government-owned Sansad.nic.in. The hacker group revealed its next target while speaking to the tech website, FactorDaily.com, via an encrypted chat platform on Monday. In the interview, the hacker group revealed that the data of emails hosted on Sansad.nic.in, includes a lot of big fish. “Next is a dump of Sansad.nic.in emails, which is quite big. It includes a lot of big fish,” the interview quoted a member of the hacker group as saying. [caption id=“attachment_3153532” align=“alignleft” width=“385”] A grab of Sansad.nic.in website[/caption] Sansad.nic.in is a government run free email service, which offers email IDs with @gov.in address to government employees (central or state). The email service is provided by National Informatics Centre, which designs, builds and manages all the information and communication technology systems used by the Government of India. Although the group didn’t clearly indicate its motive behind hacking Sansad.nic.in, when the tech website asked the member of Legion whether it’s worried about innocent that may get affected in the process, the hacker group justified its hack of the email platform by calling it a punishment for using an insecure platform like Sansad.nic.in. “If it does damage innocents — it’s their problem for using an insecure mail service,” it told FactorDaily.com. It also said that the data revealed will be interesting considering only government-affiliated people get email addresses from Sansad.nic.in. There’s not much known about the origins of the hacker group, however contradicting information has been revealed about the location of the hacker group. While The Washington Post, stated that the group is based out of India, in FactorDaily.com interview, a member of the Legion claimed to be based somewhere in eastern Europe. Interestingly, some reports claimed that the hackers are contracted by the Modi government, but the Legion member rejected the theory in the interview with FactorDaily.com. The group has also shown its displeasure in the Narendra Modi government’s push for digital currency and #DigitalIndia campaign stating the Indian banking system is too easy to hack, and that the government should think about it.