Hyderabad Students Ordered 6 Lacs Worth Of Food Free From FoodPanda After Hacking

FoodPanda definitely does not have much to be happy about, despite having been labelled one of the largest food-tech companies in India. Why, you ask?

Naturally enough, FoodPanda is already not known as one of the most earning food chains in India in spite of the fact that it’s counted among biggest food-tech companies of the country. Now an obvious question arises as to why the company has to suffer the loss? Well, the answer is here! It came as a shock to FoodPanda that some Hyderabad IIIT students found an error in its system of ordering food and availing themselves of the secret, they placed an order of Rs. 6 lacs without having to pay a single penny, i.e., absolutely free.

They got to know about the bug in their system on March 20 subsequent to receiving the confirmation message of order placing and to their utter surprise; they did not make any payment for that. This news spread as a fire in the wood and soon, many students began to place online orders in bulk, causing a great loss to the company.

There may be some who wonder who a hacker is. Well, hacker also means ‘a clever programmer’ and misuse of vulnerabilities to gain monetary benefit is termed as hacking.

Below are the details depicting how this incident occurred-

1. Students placed the order as usual. Thereafter, they made use of ‘welcome’ coupon code pertinent merely to several special users.
2. They filled details for the payment and selected PayU Money because this option provides extra discounts.
3. When the payment was to be done finally, they waited for some time but did not pay or refresh the tab.
4. Shortly, a message is received confirming the order placing.

When FoodPanda staff became aware of the bug, they instantly removed Hyderabad from the list.

As posted by the firm in a blog, “We at Brthe have a chrome extension that prompts the most suitable coupon to let you order food at the best possible price and have a good user base in IIIT-H. It was the evening of April 8th, we noticed our chrome extension getting abnormally large traffic. When we checked on this, the news about the bug was spreading through IIIT hostels like wild fire. Each person went on to fulfill their food fantasies. After all free food does taste better. The fanciest desserts from Baskin Robins and the largest pizzas were from Papa John’s were ordered. Delivery boys queued up outside the campus for hours after the gates closed. According to the students, orders worth over 6 lakhs were placed.”

A student on behalf of the whole student body said,

The story on medium was written by the founders of the brthe startup, also IIIT students who just wanted to boast about the free food they could order, exploiting the flaw in the website and to sell their chrome extension.

It is true that few students made use of the flaw in the system. But those are a small minority of our institute and the student body is really ashamed of their actions. The 6 lakh figure was author’s own imagination.

The entire episode has put our institute in bad light and already some of our recruiters started talking about cancelling hiring . We students are really worried about the situation. We are actually coordinating with the students to collect the money and return it to the website.

This incident flooded Twitter with loads of tweets-

https://twitter.com/hiway/status/586445871262212096

What are your views about this Foodpanda Incident?? Will it be considered as Foodpanda mistake or Students mistake?