New Delhi/ Bhubaneswar: Delhi Police have arrested four suspects including a BTech graduate from Odisha in connection with the data leak from Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), a source said Monday.
The four accused were taken in custody following a manhunt in three different states. One of them is a BTech graduate from Odisha, two are school dropouts from Haryana and the other one is from Jhansi, the source revealed.
The source informed that the accused, who had met on a gaming platform, conspired to hack the data and capitalise on the sale for quick financial gains.
Earlier this year, the Cyber cell of Delhi Police took suo motu cognisance of the situation after reports surfaced regarding the significant data breach.
In October this year, in a massive data breach, data of over 81.5 crore citizens held with the ICMR were on sale on the dark web, which contained crucial information such as Aadhaar and passport details, along with names, phone numbers, and addresses.
The data breach noticed by the US-based cybersecurity and intelligence firm Resecurity mentioned that “on October 9, a threat actor going by the alias ‘pwn0001’ posted a thread on Breach Forums brokering access to 815 million Indian Citizen Aadhaar and Passport records”.
Moreover, the cybersecurity analysts found one of the leaked samples containing 100,000 records of PII (personally identifiable information) related to Indian residents.
In this sample leak, the analysts identified valid Aadhaar Card IDs, which were corroborated via a government portal that provides a ‘Verify Aadhaar’ feature.
The analysts also managed to connect with the threat actor and learned they were willing to sell the entire Aadhaar and Indian passport dataset for $80,000 (over Rs 66 lakh).
PNN & Agencies
