Personal Data Of 26 Lakh Airtel Users Leaked On Web, Company Rubbishes Claims

Even though telecom operators claim that they have taken stringent measures to secure users' data, we keep hearing about data breaches frequently. Airtel is facing the same issue, where the data of 26 lakhs users are on the web. The data leak includes personal details, such as the Aadhaar card number along with the address number, and gender details of Airtel users as revealed by Rajshekhar Rajaharia an Internet Security Researcher and Entrepreneur.

Meanwhile, India Today claims that it has access to a video, which has a chat between Airtel's security team and the Red Rabbit team (hacker team). On the other hand, Airtel issued a statement and said that there is no such breach.

"Airtel takes great pride in deploying various measures to safeguard the privacy of its customers. In this specific case, we confirm that there is no data breach at our end. The claims made by these groups reveal glaring inaccuracies and a large proportion of the data records do not even belong to Airtel. We have already apprised the relevant authorities of the matter," Airtel informed Gizbot.

Details Behind Airtel's Subscribers Data Leaked

Furthermore, the report said that the hackers have uploaded the details of Airtel users in January 2021 and now they are looking for money from the operator. "Hackers communicated with Airtel security teams and then tried to blackmail the company and extort $3500 in Bitcoins from it," Rajaharia said.

He pointed out that earlier hackers deleted the data; however, now it is available on another link. He said that hackers wanted to sell the data but could not. This is why hackers have dumped the data on the internet. Furthermore, he highlighted that data has been leaked via third parties and not from the telecom operator. It is worth mentioning that earlier, Reliance Jio faced a similar issue in 2017.

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