Personally identifiable Aadhaar data of 815 mn Indians up for sale on dark web

So far, there has been no official confirmation of the leak from the government. (Representative Image)

Personally identifiable Aadhar data of 815 million Indians has been put online for sale. According to US Cybersecurity firm Resecurity, the data contains Aadhar and passport details, along with names, phone numbers and addresses.

As reported by Business Standard, the database of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) may have been compromised.

According to Resecurity, the breach was identified on October 9, when an individual with the alias 'pwn001' shared a post on a famous dark web forum that listed the private data for sale. The entire dataset was being sold for $80,000.

So far, there has been no official confirmation of the leak from the government. When Resecurity contacted the hacker, 'pwn001' shared some spreadsheets with them which had the Aadhar data. The team verified the IDs and found they were real.

Back in August, Resecurity reported another breach that included 1.8 TB of data and was sold online under the name, 'Indian internal law enforcement organization'.

The team verified that this too contained personally identifiable information from Aadhar IDs, Voter IDs and driving license records. Some of these appeared to have come from a company that offers pre-paid SIM cards.