Free speech is not acceptable to Twitter

Rajsekhar Rajaharia wrote on his twitter account that, “Twitter has locked my account for 12 Hour. There was nothing...just previously tweeted screenshots in image. But Twitter unlocked my account in just 4 hour.”

It was the second time in the month of March that Rajaharia’s Twitter account was locked for tweets related to the MobiKwik incident. Before this, his account was locked on March 9 over a tweet where he had criticised MobiKwik for not taking the incident “seriously”. In this case too, Twitter said he violated its rules against posting private information and only unlocked his account after he deleted the tweet, Rajaharia said.

Twitter must explain Raksekhar’s fault. It clearly shows that Twitter is quiet influenced by the Corporate world who funds Twitter to run.

It seems twitter is no more a safe place to raise your voice. Anyone with an email to twitter can lock your account. Twitter told Rajaharia that his account was locked for a tweet in which he had shared a screenshot of his email conversation with MobiKwik, where the company had denied facing a security breach.

This meant that Rajaharia’s Twitter account was good only for browsing the site and sending direct messages to his followers. Rajaharia said that the platform banned him from tweeting, retweeting and liking until he took down the tweet in question. “This can potentially ruin the image of security researchers like me as people might think we deleted certain tweets after taking some money from companies we tweeted against,” Rajaharia told VARINDIA.

Rajesekhar Rajajharia had revealed, in what is believed to be one of India's biggest data Leak in the history, where the data of 10 crore Mobikwik users was for sale on dark web. However, the Gurugram-based digital payments company Mobikwik is denying the data breach despite claims by the independent security researchers that the data over 8.2TB in size has been put on sale on the Dark Web for a while now.

The hackers have made the data accessible through a search engine that suggests some of the leaked data elements including the names, phone numbers, and email IDs of millions of affected users. Denying this, MobiKwik said it did not find any evidence of a breach.

Sources said, Mobikwik wrote to AWS, on 25^th February late night around 2.00 am, for the ticket support, that there were 8 TB of data been downloaded which was there in the back-up. This chat message has also been leaked. The server of Mobikwik is hosted in the AWS server. It may be a fact that someone might have shared the user id and password of the fintech company.

MobiKwik is India’s leading fintech platform, operating businesses in consumer payments, payment gateway, and financial services. MobiKwik’s payments network is one of the largest in India with 120 million users, 3 million merchants, and 300+ billers.

After the data was hacked on 25^th February 2021, the hacker had put all the 8 TB of data on the darknet, where anyone can visit and see the information they seek (KYC and User data). A report says there were 10 lakh searches to get the information over the web. It is also to be noted that the promoters had also placed their credit cards details on their portal, along with their mobile number, which were also public.

Now the question is what makes the promoters not to accept the fact and kept silence above a period of month by keeping the users data under the vulnerable conditions, that the data can be used by any means. What are the security measures Mobikwik had undertaken while dealing with the public data.

Was it not the responsibility of MobiKwik to inform the users about the data breach and at the same time, were they not supposed to inform the RBI and CERT-in regarding the issue. All the registered users have their right to know, weather their data is compromised or not.

Now, the company is blaming the public, they might have shared their data to many e-commerce and other online companies. Now the credibility of the investors in Mobikwik is coming under the question mark.

However, the company has informed the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team that on March 1 there was an unauthorised attempt to access MobiKwik’s user-facing application programming interface associated with a payment link generated through its platform.

MobiKwik claims to have raised $110 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, MediaTek, and media companies NDTV and Bennett Coleman and Company Limited (BCCL). Last year in December 2020, Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan backed the digital payments company MobiKwik.

MobiKwik, backed by Sequoia Capital and Bajaj Finance, has been facing serious criticism for denying the data leak and now the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has ordered MobiKwik to probe allegations that data of its 110 million users was breached, and warned the company it will face fines if lapses are found. However, the RBI was "not happy" with the company's initial response and has asked it to act immediately and also ordered for a forensic audit of Mobikwik systems.