India’s Anonymous is attacking India’s most powerful institutions

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India has its own Anonymous.

Legion, a new hacker group, has already attacked email and Twitter accounts of India’s top politicians, businessmen, and journalists, and is now threatening a “data dump” from government email servers and banking systems.

The threat is growing, so much so that India’s ministry of electronics and IT has ordered an immediate audit of the financial sector, a review of the IT Act to make it stronger, and the setting up of a SWAT team to respond to unusual incidents on a war footing, The Economic Times reports.

“There is huge traffic flowing through the IT platforms, if there is any mishap, the systems have to be resilient and we have to take appropriate measures,” Ravi Shankar Prasad, India’s IT minister, told The Economic Times.

A digital payment section has been created in CERT-In, an agency which monitors internet traffic real time, the newspaper reports.

India’s IT Act, the country’s primary law for dealing with cybercrime and electronic commerce, was introduced sixteen years ago in 2000. The tech map of the country has seen vast changes since then. For one, Twitter did not exist in 2000.

The Legion team has already hacked into four high-profile Twitter accounts in India, releasing account owners’ personal telephone numbers, bank account details, and email passwords.

The group is supposed to be a coalition of like-minded hackers based out of five countries – the United States, Sweden, Canada, Thailand and Romania, according to the Delhi police’s cybercrime cell.

The first attack was on Rahul Gandhi, the heir to the Congress party. The Congress is India’s oldest political party and traces its roots back to Mahatma Gandhi.

Legion sent out about six tweets from his Twitter account, insulting Rahul Gandhi himself. The hackers had also changed his bio on Twitter to “Retarded Gandhi.”

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It then sent out emails and passwords of disgraced Indian business magnate Vijay Mallya, and went on to attack the accounts of Barkha Dutt and Ravish Kumar, two of India’s most well-known faces in TV journalism.