Paytm Mall sends legal notice to Cyble on false claim
2 min read 07 Sep 2020, 09:22 PM ISTNow, the e-commerce firm through its legal notice has asked Cyble to immediately stop making any further false claims on the matter
PremiumBengaluru: E-commerce platform Paytm Mall has sent a legal notice to cyber-risk intelligence firm Cyble Inc. on Monday, for its blogpost which alleged that the ecommerce platform had suffered a massive data breach.
On 30 August, Cyble said in a company blogspot that Paytm Mall was hacked by a cybercrime group under the alias ‘John Wick’, which led the hacker to get unrestricted access to the entire database of the company.
In addition to this Cyble had also mentioned on its blog, citing sources, that the ‘grey hat’ hacker had demanded a ransom of 10 Ethereum (ETH), equivalent to $4,000 from Paytm Mall.
A ‘grey hat’ is a computer hacker who looks for vulnerabilities in platforms and systems, without the owner’s knowledge and asks for a fee to fix the issue.
‘John Wick’ recently hacked the Twitter account of Narendra Modi’s personal website, last week, and through a tweet, clarified that it had not hacked ‘Paytm Mall’.
Now, the e-commerce firm through its legal notice has asked Cyble to immediately stop making any further false claims on the matter, and issue a public communication stating that the contents of its August 30 blog post are incorrect.
Further, Paytm Mall has given Cyble a week to comply with its requests. In case of non-compliance, the e-commerce firm said that it will move to court and initiate civil and criminal proceedings against the cybersecurity company.
Mint has seen a copy of the legal notice, which was sent to Cyble.
“The most astonishing fact is that since your organisation is in the business of providing services around this area i.e. cyber threats, risks, and cyber security, thus we expected more sensible, professional and ethical standards from your side," said Paytm Mall to Cyble, as a part of its legal notice.
“[...]please note that your aforesaid unprofessional and callous act in circulating an unverified and false piece of information in the public has already done damage to the company, as our customers are completely disrupted and terrified by this information," added Paytm Mall, in its legal notice.
A query sent to a Paytm Mall spokesperson did not elicit a response at the time of publication.
Further, according to Cyble, ‘John Wick’ has broken into multiple Indian companies and collected ransom from various Indian organizations including OTT platform Zee5, fintech startups, Stashfin, Sumo Payroll, Stashfin, i2ifunding, through other aliases such as ‘South Korea’ and ‘HCKINDIA’.
