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Guwahati, Oct 31: In a shocking revelation, an exclusive report by News 18 claims that the personal information of 81.5 crore citizens with the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has been leaked on the dark web. The report further claimed that the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is likely to probe the matter to identify the crux of the matter.
According to the report, records of 81.5 crore Indians, including Aadhaar and passport information along with names, phone numbers and addresses, have been advertised on a breached forum.
The report noted that the breach was initially noticed by Resecurity, an American cybersecurity and intelligence agency. According to the cyber firm, a ‘threat actor’ with the alias ‘pwn001’ posted a thread on Breach Forums,– which describes itself as a ‘premier Databreach discussion and leaks forum’ – enabling access to records of 815 million (81.5 crore) Indians.
Moreover, the threat actor claims that the data were extracted from the COVID-19 test details of citizens registered with ICMR. Spread sheets containing four large leak samples with fragments of Aadhaar data as proof were also shared by pwn001 on the dark web. Upon analysis, these were identified as valid Aadhaar card IDs.
The source of the leakage is yet to be ascertained, as parts of the COVID-19 test data go to the National Informatics Centre (NIC), ICMR and Ministry of Health.
While there was no clarification from ICMR over the claims of data leakage, all the top officials from various agencies, as well as ministries, have been roped in. Moreover, the required Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) has been deployed to control the damage, according to reports.