New Delhi: Personal data like aadhaar and passport details of around 81.5 crore Indians has been reportedly leaked on the dark web, which also makes it the biggest data breach ever in the history of India. The hacker ‘pwn0001’ who had advertised this leak on the dark web, has brought this huge breach ever to everybone’s attention.
Meanwhile, it is believed that these leaked informations are the ones collected by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) during COVID-19 testing.
As of now, on the basis of the information shared by the hacker, these data include Aadhaar and passport details, names, phone numbers and the residential addresses as well both temporary and permanent. The hacker confirmed that these data are actually the ones collected by ICMR during Covid-19 testing.
It was Resecurity, an American agency specialising in cybersecurity and intelligence, which brought the breach this big to light. On October 9, ‘pwn0001’ disclosed all the details related to this breach on Breach Forum, disclosing the availability of personal details of 1.5 crore Indians.
The researchers at Resecurity, also discovered that other than the leaked data, the breach also included around 100,000 files with some personal details of the Indian citizens.
According to a reports, the Computer Emergency Response Team of India (CERT-In) has also alerted ICMR about the breach. However, identifying the centre of the breach is a bt challenging as the information related to Covid-19 testing is scattered across various government departments like the National Informatics Centre (NIC), ICMR, and the Ministry of Health.