Lucknow Municipal Corporation developing system to prevent digital data breach

LUCKNOW : The Lucknow Municipal Corporation (LMC) is in the process of developing a foolproof system to safeguard its birth and death registration data after the digital database was hacked by cyber fraudsters recently.

On August 5, the LMC came to know that the system was hacked. Cyber frauds created a false ID and issued some birth and death certificates from other districts and now efforts were on to prevent data breach, said Dr SK Rawat, nagar swasthya adhikari.

Around five certificates of other cities were issued, which was detected by the LMC. Officials

swung into action and cancelled all these certificates. They held an audit of all the certificates issued during the last six months, which were found genuine, he said.

Rawat said, “Such problems have been surfacing regularly since the implementation of the new system under which the control of issuing birth and death certificates has been given to various agencies. Similar problems were reported from Agra Municipal Corporation and Meerut too.”

Earlier, only LMC used to issue birth and death certificates but now around 30 government hospitals and 70 private hospitals were issuing these certificates, said LMC officials.

Recently hackers breached the portal of Balrampur Hospital and issued some fake birth and death certificates.Rawat said, “People can misuse death certificates as they can transfer property of a person showing him dead. A person can claim life insurance amount, a criminal can get a case closed showing himself dead. So, issuing a wrong death or birth certificate can spell trouble for anyone.”

The data system breach was reported to the police immediately, but they had not converted it into an FIR, said another official of the LMC.