As part of a security error, over one lakh Aadhaar numbers were leaked by the government of the Indian state of Jharkhand.
According to a report by TechCrunch, the web system which was responsible for marking the attendance of the government employees in Jharkhand was left without any security measures since 2014.
Due to this, around 1,66,000 employees’ data such as Aadhaar numbers, names, job titles, email IDs and partial phone numbers were left unprotected and allowed access to anyone who could access the web pages.
Additionally, the images which have been uploaded on the system for attendance used the employees’ Aadhaar number as file name, which is supposed to be a confidential 12-digit number for each Indian citizen.
The report further suggests that the data on the website can be accessed with great ease with simple Python codes, as told by security researcher Robert Baptiste.
Neither the UIDAI nor the Jharkhand Government commented on the security lapse.
To recall, Aadhaar data leaks have been prevalent for a long time; a while ago Indian publication The Tribune had suggested that Aadhaar details could be directly accessed for INR 500. However, the UIDAI denied the report completely.
While the central database (controlled by the Unique Identification Authority of India or UIDAI) hasn’t been affected by the incident to a great extent, the incident calls for security measures to be taken by the Indian Government to citizen’s data protection.
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