ISLAMABAD: The Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan (SECP) clarifies that the company registry represents public information, and is available to the general public by paying necessary fee under the law.

In addition, certain information is publicly available on our website for the general public’s review, in line with international best practices of corporate registries. In this regard, few recent posts on social media relating to unauthorized access to information relating to companies, require clarification.

It was recently identified that an incident involving web scraping of the data available at SECP’s website had taken place, as a result of which an unauthorized data extraction was performed. Following this, certain data has been copied and unauthorizedly published. However, it must be emphasized that all the fields of data unauthorizedly published, are available under Form-A and Form-29, upon payment of a fee.

Nonetheless, owing to the unauthorized nature of the access, as soon as the matter came to the notice of SECP, XML tags were restricted immediately. To further strengthen the API protection, requisite modifications have been put in place. Furthermore, until a complete vulnerability assessment and penetration testing is completed, company name search available on the SECP website has been temporarily suspended.

Simultaneously, SECP is initiating all legal recourses against those involved in this unauthorized access. It must be emphasized that SECP has attended to this matter with utmost urgency and will continue to ensure the integrity of its systems and data at the highest standards.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2022