Smriti DixitIndians have always been reluctant to go for electronic modes of investment be it bitcoins, trading or anything else. The lack of knowledge about price movements made them look at the market as the most risky place to pool their funds.
In reality; Share trading is simple buying & selling of shares. What their concern is whether their money stays safe or not? This problem was solved when the market players having experience in the trading business became the intermediary in the process.
But this has now raised a new issue of data insecurity where transactions that involve huge amount of data; if leaked can cost a loads of money to the counter parties.The recent news is about the same segment where the nation’s online trading platform Upstox suffered a data breach. The losses incurred & other details can be looked upon in the article. Let’s get inside to know more.
INSIGHTS INTO THE MATTER
The company is basically a discount broking firm and the breach suffered is quite huge. It has clearly targeted the crucial information that consists of Aadhaar, PAN , bank account numbers , mobile numbers & email addresses.
The company although made it clear that the stocks of the holders inclusive of their funds & shares are safe. This is due to the operational flexibility of the platform where your funds are linked to the only linked account that you mentioned while setting an Upstox account. The shares also are held in depositories which are Central Depositories Services India Ltd (CDSL) & National Securities Depository Ltd (NSDL).
But this issue is not as small as it looks; the breach contained the signature photographs too which can easily be misused & transacted on the behalf of the parties without their consent.
The security researcher Rajshekhar Rajaharia clearly pointed out that this breach was a result of a problem on the ends of amazon web service key. The same were the reasons for the recent Mobi Kwik breach too.
The company after the issue stated that “We have upgraded our security systems manifold recently, on the recommendations of a global cyber-security firm. We brought in the expertise of this globally renowned firm after we received emails claiming unauthorised access into our database,”
MORE ABOUT UPSTOX
The company is based in Delhi and was started in the year 2011. It is a discount broker dealing in stocks that is backed by Tiger Global & Ratan Tata. It was founded by Ravi Kumar, Kavitha Subramanian and Shrini Viswanath. The company provides its experience through products like:
- Upstox PRO
- PRO Web
- PRO Mobile
- Upstox MF
- Upstox DEV
The prominent partners are Dartstock, NEST Trader and Fox Trader. There are currently more than 1 million customers having more than 2000 Upstox partners. The average daily turn-over is around Rs. 25000 crore.
The question is that there has been a string of companies that have been hacked like MobiKwik, Juspay, Click India, ChqBook, Wedme Good , Dunzo, Big Basket and now Upstox. The reasons are expected to be the sudden rapid growth post pandemic where companies have failed to give proper consideration to the security of their applications.
The businesses should start catering to this question that how secure is this ecosystem??