If you are an Airtel customer, there’s a high chance your personal information has been compromised.
Data of as many as 2.5 million Airtel users has been compromised in total. Read on to find out how this happened, right here!
Hackers Put Up Personal Data Of 2.5 Million Airtel Users For Sale
Hackers have managed to obtain access to many personal details, including telephone numbers, address, city, Aadhaar card number, and gender details, and put them up to sale. They have claimed that they had the details of all Airtel users in India and that they wanted to sell the data.
An Internet security researcher, Rajshekhar Rajaharia, has revealed that hackers also communicated with Airtel security teams, and then tried to blackmail them and extort $3500 in Bitcoins from the company.
However, the data has been put up for sale on a website created by the hackers, which indicates that they weren’t succesful with their plan.
In a tweet, Rajaraharia states, “Another Big Data Breach? A Hacker Group alleged uploaded “shell” in
@airtelindia
Server. Now selling all India Airtel subscribers data including Aadhaar Number. Posted 2.5 Million as sample data. (in Jan 2021)
#InfoSec #DataLeak #GDPR #databreaches #dataprotection #DataPrivacyDay”
The website has been taken down and the data is no longer available. However, it is not clear if and why the hackers took down the website.
Airtel’s Reply: Data Breach Not From Their Servers, But From Government Agencies
Reports are that the data may not have been leaked from Airtel’s systems or servers, but might have been leaked from other sources. This might mostly be the government agencies, which have access to some of the telecom data. Additionally, this also indicates the reason that the leaked 2.5 million numbers belong to the J&K region.
In a statement, Airtel has said, “In this specific case, we confirm that there is no data breach at our end. In fact, the claims made by this group reveal glaring inaccuracies and a large proportion of the data records do not even belong to Airtel.”
The company assured that relevant authorities have been informed of the entire matter.
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