In another major uncover, a consistent client of OLA cabs has revealed something very shocking which talks around a genuine glitch in the online security administration of the popular startup. A straightforward human mistake at the server backend opened up a rundown of user information with names and telephone numbers to Swapnil Midha through SMS.
OLA was (unintentionally) sending her other users’ confirmation messages all day. Unfortunately, she educated the organization about the very sensitive and crucial individual data being sent over to her, however the organization essentially decided to overlook her input.
Even before this episode happened, an ethical hacker likewise figured out how to take advantage of the not really secure payment gateway of OLA Cabs and figured out how to refill his Wallet with heaps of money. Since his aim was not to do anything unlawful but just to inform them about this technical glitch, he however reported back to OLA about the security gap, and they decided to disregard him as well.
Swapnil Midha shared this experience with her fellow social media friends, and told them about this incident wherein she was being sent messages with user information consistently on her phone. The post is currently not available on her profile, however, we do have a screenshot (beneath). Messages were jumbled, yet had a great deal of data with individual (delicate) points of interest of user names, telephone numbers and locations.
She mentioned her woes and concerns on her Facebook post, hoping that the concerned firm would take some action about it. “About three weeks ago, I booked an Ola cab for a long-distance drive. After the ride, I received a few garbled texts from “VM-OLACAB” that I didn’t think much of and ignored. These messages were alpha-numeric with hashes and made no sense to me whatsoever. I assumed there was some system error and did not anticipate the sleep deprivation that followed. When I went to bed that night, my phone beeped once, twice, thrice. For someone who doesn’t use her phone for more than the absolutely necessary call and catching up on the latest time article, this was beyond strange. Nobody texts me at 11 pm, not even the pregnancy insurance spammer,” said Swapnil.
