Sensitive information belonging to an incredible 81.5 crore Indians has surfaced on the dark web, potentially resulting in India’s largest data breach in history. The worrying finding was made by a hacker known as ‘pwn0001,’ who advertised the stolen data on the dark web, including Aadhaar and passport details, names, phone numbers, and addresses. The compromised information is thought to have come from the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), specifically during COVID-19 testing.
The breach was discovered when Resecurity, a cybersecurity and intelligence outfit based in the United States, discovered the leak. On October 9, ‘pwn0001’ revealed information about the breach on Breach Forums, disclosing the availability of 815 million records. To put this in context, India’s entire population is slightly more than 1.486 billion people. Researchers at Resecurity confirmed the accuracy of the leaked data by cross-referencing selected records with the “Verify Aadhaar” feature of a government portal, proving the authenticity of the Aadhaar information.
Because of the sensitivity of the situation, the Computer Emergency Response Team of India (CERT-In) notified the ICMR of the breach. However, the spread of COVID-19 test information across several government agencies, such as the National Informatics Centre (NIC), the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), and the Ministry of Health, has made it difficult to establish the actual source of the breach.
According to the most recent information, the Ministry of Information and Technology and other appropriate agencies have yet to issue an official response to the incident. This event reflects past cybersecurity issues faced by famous Indian medical institutes, such as a recent attack of AIIMS’ systems, which resulted in the compromise of over 1TB of data and a temporary move to manual record-keeping. The need to solution such breaches is obvious, as they pose a serious threat to individuals’ privacy as well as national security.