Self-acclaimed hacker ends up exposing himself yet gain

The self-acclaimed hacker going by the name of Elliot Anderson is in news again. He claims to target and expose security flaws in the government ID systems. The most famous of his targets has been the AADHAAR about which he was found making a false claim that was duly refuted. TRAI chief R S Sharma had thrown an open challenge on his Twitter handle to all the Aadhar critics, by sharing his 12 digit AADHAAR number. He challenged them to try and harm him in any way by using his AADHAAR number. Twitter user going by the name of Elliot Anderson then shared some of Sharma’s innocuous personal information.

Elliot Anderson and other such users prejudiced against AADHAAR soon started sharing Sharma’s personal information on their Twitter handle. The hacker and some of those prejudiced against the AADHAR claimed that this corroborated the security threats associated with the system and that it was used to disclose his personal information in the public domain. It was also reported that someone had claimed to have used R S Sharma’s AADHAAR number to deposit one rupee in his bank account in a desperate attempt to show that AADHAR number can be misused. However, this is a bizarre claim as depositing money in someone’s bank account is not something that would require hacking skills.

Later on, the UIDAI had to intervene and it was made clear that none of the information pertaining to Sharma was fetched from Aadhaar database or the UIDAI’s servers. In a statement, the UIDAI which stated, “Sharma’s mobile number is available on National Informatics Centre’s (NIC) website as he was once Secretary IT. His date of birth is available in the Civil List of IAS Officers which is kept in public domain and his address is on Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) website because he is the Chairman. They clubbed all these inputs and claimed to have breached the Aadhaar database. Aadhaar database is fully safe and secure and no such information about Mr Sharma has been fetched from UIDAI’s servers or Aadhaar database.” From this, it became clear that the ‘hacker’ was making false claims.

This time around, the same ‘hacker’ has tried to suggest that prime minister Modi has himself committed a major data breach. He claimed that prime minister Modi forgot to blur the PAN number in the receipt of his contribution to the BJP that he shared on his Twitter handle. Therefore, he implied that prime minister Modi had himself committed a data security breach, divulging his own PAN number in the public domain.

However, it seems that the self acclaimed hacker is making a mockery of himself all over again. He does not seem to understand that it is not prime minister Modi’s PAN number but the BJP’s PAN number. The number does not belong to prime minister Modi or any other individual but to a national political party and is therefore publicly available. Thus, there was no need to blur it. However, it seems that the ‘hacker’ suffers from not only poor hacking skills but also from lack of common sense. Every time an online payment is made to an entity, whether in the form of a donation or bill payment, the PAN number of the recipient entity shows up. There is no rocket science behind it but this Twitter user going by the name of Elliot Anderson does not seem to understand this simple fact.

This is as farcical on the hacker’s part as his ridiculous claims about misusing the TRAI chief’s AADHAAR to access his personal information and putting it in public domain. The ‘hacker’ could not even make out that the PAN number belongs to BJP and not to prime minister Modi. There is no longer any doubt about the fact that he is not a ‘hacker’. It seems as if he is some paid online troll and in all probability a paid Congress troll having no ‘hacking’ knowledge or even common sense for that matter. After his self goal in the AADHAAR fiasco followed by this self goal, he has exposed himself.