When the top leadership is decided based on their surnames, incompetence can flow down to the very bottom.
Earlier this week, the Congress party launched an ambitious campaign to recruit 5 lakh social media users, and create a “digital army”. The launch was announced by none other than Rahul Gandhi himself, who shared a recorded message asking people to sign up on Congress’s website.
But a Twitter user has now revealed that the details of the users who’d signed up are available for all to see, right on Congress’s website.
Twitter user @rsgovin today shared a thread, explaining how he’d exploited a leak in Congress’ website. “We’re all aware that @INCIndia has launched a mega campaign of recruiting “5 Lakh Social Media Warriors”. The registrations are also on, at http://incsmw.in. The registration form seeks info like Name, Address, Mobile No, Twitter/FB a/c handles, Email, etc. But, is all that data you feed there, safe & secure? No,” he writes.
“Anyone can download the complete data of all such registered members. Take a look at a few screens,” he adds. Attached to the tweet is a screenshot that shows the data these social media users had entered on Congress’ website, including their names, phone numbers, emails and social media IDs.
This data was organized state-wise, and @rsgovin was able to access all of it.
Incredibly, the data of senior members of Congress’ social media team, including Gaurav Padhi and others, was also publicly available. This included their usernames and passwords to access the website, and their email addresses and phone numbers.
It’s an embarrassing data leak, and one that’s also dangerous — when social media users would’ve signed up to become a part of Congress’ social media team, they wouldn’t have bargained for the party making their personal information public to anyone who could exploit the flaw in their website. The Congress party has often been playing catch up with the BJP as far as being tech-savvy is concerned, and with the party inadvertently leaking the personal details of those who’d signed up for its latest initiative, its social media army plan might be imploding before it’s even got off the ground.
