Security guard at Jaya’s estate hacked to death
group of men on Monday hacked to death a middleaged security guard and seriously injured another at a sprawling estate in Tamil Nadu’s Kodanad, owned by former state chief minister J Jayalalithaa. Police said the murder took place between 11.30pm on Sunday and 1.30am on Monday. No missing property complaints were filed but local police said the gang of eight men were after some important documents. The dead guard was identified as Om Bahadur while the injured staff, Krishna Bahadur, is being treated at a local hospital.
Days after HT reported a data breach of over a million Aadhaar numbers from a Jharkhand government website, at least four more instances of similar leaks on other government websites have come to light. These breaches come at a time when the SC is hearing a set of petitions challenging a controversial government decision to make it mandatory to seed Permanent Account Numbers (PAN) with Aadhaar numbers for filing income tax returns.
“We have taken the Jharkhand incident very seriously,” said Ajay Bhushan Pandey, CEO of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), noting that publishing UID numbers was illegal, “Action will be taken against those responsible under the Aadhaar act.” The unsecure websites investigated by HT include a scholarship database in Uttar Pradesh, a public distribution system website in Chandigarh, a pensioners dashboard in Kerala and a Swach Bharat Mission website maintained by the ministry of water and sanitation, which cumulatively compromise the digital identities of thousands of citizens.
Some of these websites were taken down after HT reporters approached the relevant authorities for comment, but in other cases, the confidential information is still online. “I just do not understand why and how this is happening,” said Jairam Ramesh, a senior Congress leader.
In Jharkhand, the UIDAI moved swiftly to shut down the website. On Monday, state officials sought to implement an additional layer of security to protect those whose identities have been compromised by the leak. “You cannot see the Aadhaar numbers anymore on the website. We are working on a One-time Password (OTP) system for added security,” said Jharkhand social welfare secretary MS Bhatia.
Apar Gupta, a SC lawyer and a petitioner in the Aadhaar cases, said, “The leakage instances show that the technical readiness of the government is just not in place to tackle a project of this scale.” Gupta saidcentre’s notifications to seed discreet databases with Aadhaar numbers had created sensitive aggregations of citizen data at the state-level. “But these notifications have no guidance whatsoever about the data security protocols ,” Gupta said.
In the absence of central guidance, each state department has created its own unique way of storing data, often with the help of private software companies. Pandey, the UIDAI CEO, said the ministry of electronics and information technology has written to all states and ministries asking them not to display such information.