Aadhaar card data leaked: 81.5 crore Indian personal data leaked

US cyber security firm Resecurity published a blog in early October pointing to a common trend of Indians’ personal data being sold through the dark web. The agency found that a threat actor had advertised to sell 815 million (81.5 Crore) Aadhaar records for $80,000.

The blog also raised concerns about identity theft, citing other instances of Indians personal information being put up for sale. It claimed that records of 815 million Indians, including names, ages, phone numbers, Aadhaar numbers and addresses, could be sold. PWN 0001 shared a sample containing 1 lakh phone numbers and Aadhaar numbers.

The sample dataset consists of personal information of 10-year-old children. It is still unclear from which database the records of 81.5 crore Indians, including children’s personally identifiable information (PII), were breached. The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) database was breached, the report said.

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The Computer Emergency Response Team of India (CERT-In) has informed the ICMR about the breach and it needs to look into it, the report said. If this proves to be true, it is not clear why ICMR would have details of 10-year-old children. Hunter investigators at Resecurity have identified two threat actors who brokered access to Indian PII and Aadhaar records at Breach Forums, a major cybercrime hub.

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In October, Resecurity flagged a thread posted by a threat actor using the online handle ‘pwn0001’ claiming to have a database containing the Aadhaar and passport records of 815 million Indian citizens. At the same time, the actor shared spreadsheets containing four large leak patterns with snippets of Aadhaar data as evidence. One of the leaked samples contained 100,000 records of PII related to Indian residents.