India telecom operator Reliance Jio investigating claims of alleged data breach
MUMBAI: India’s Reliance Jio said yesterday it was investigating claims that personal data of over 100 million of its customers had leaked onto a website, in what may be the first ever large-scale data breach at an Indian telecom operator.
Jio, India’s newest telecoms entrant, said that the data on the website, ‘Magicapk.com’, appeared to be ‘unauthentic’ and that its subscriber data was safe and maintained with the highest security.
But people complained on Twitter about personal information of Jio users being publicly available on Magicapk.com, and some Indian media said that their checks had led them to believe the leak was real.
Jio declined to comment on the newspaper reports.
“We have informed law enforcement agencies about the claims of the website and will follow through to ensure strict action is taken,” a Jio spokeswoman said.
Newspaper Indian Express said it was able to cross-verify details on a number of Jio customers known to them.
“Indianexpress.com checked with some Jio numbers and found that details of numbers bought as late as last week are up on the site.
However, it was not clear if all the numbers are available on the site, as a lot of queries were throwing a blank,” the newspaper reported.
Magicapk.com is showing as ‘suspended’ since late on Sunday.
Many users had been registered for Reliance Jio services by using a 12-digit Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) provided number, commonly known as the ‘Adhaar’ number.
The Indian government has begun mandating the use of Adhaar for everything from opening a bank account to filing tax returns.
The ‘Adhaar’ number, which works on similar lines as Social Security numbers in the US, is unique to every Indian citizen and it stores biometric data of users in a centralized database.