Sriki hacked Rahul Gandhi's Twitter account, says chargesheet

In a hacking case that could have political ramifications, notorious hacker Srikrishna Ramesh alias Sriki hacked into Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s Twitter account and reset the passwords.

According to the charge sheet filed against the hacker, the incident occurred in 2016.

Apart from Rahul Gandhi, Sriki allegedly hacked into the accounts of media firm NDTV, fugitive businessman Vijay Mallya and journalist Barkha Dutt’s websites and twitter accounts.

Sriki hacked into the Net4India data centre in December 2016, using a “remote code execution vulnerability”. The data centre had hosted all the sites and domain names, using which he hacked into the accounts of Rahul and others.

The hacker, using the vulnerability, changed the mail server records of these servers and reset the passwords of the Twitter accounts. He gained illegal access into these high-profile accounts, according to Sriki’s confession attached with the charge sheet.

After Rahul’s account was breached, it can be recalled that the Delhi police sought information from five countries to help them trace those behind the hack.

Sriki said that he had logs of the chat pertaining to the above hacks in his Skype account and cases were registered with Delhi’s economic offences wing against a pseudonym called ‘Legion’.

The hacker allegedly masked his IP addresses, due to which police traced the IP address to multiple countries. According to reports, following a preliminary enquiry into the hack, police suspected the hack to have originated from Sweden, Romania, the United States, Canada and Thailand.

Attacks on the Twitter accounts of Rahul, NDTV and others, was among the series of hacks carried out by Sriki, who is accused of hacking into several bitcoin exchanges and poker websites.

Sriki had joined a network of blackhat hackers at an early age and started exploiting vulnerabilities in various websites and servers for personal gain.

(With inputs from Akram Mohammed)

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