National Desk, 31st October: A major data breach affecting approximately 815 million Indian citizens has come to light, with personal data, including names, phone numbers, addresses, Aadhaar, and passport information, now reportedly available for sale on the dark web. The threat actor responsible, identified as ‘pwn0001’, is said to be offering the entire Aadhaar and Indian passport database for sale at a price of $80,000.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has initiated an investigation into the breach, which is suspected to involve data gathered by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) during COVID-19 testing.
Notably, this breach includes over 100,000 files containing personal details of Indian citizens, some of which have been verified using the government’s ‘Verify Aadhaar’ feature. The Computer Emergency Response Team of India (CERT-In) has alerted ICMR about the breach. Identifying the source of the breach is complicated due to the fragmented nature of COVID-19 test data spread across various government bodies such as the National Informatics Centre (NIC), ICMR, and the Ministry of Health.
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