Data of 2.5 mn Airtel users in J&K allegedly leaked; telco says no breach

Data of around 25 lakh Bharti Airtel subscribers of Jammu and Kashmir circle, including Aadhaar numbers, address and date of birth, has reportedly been leaked by hackers, even as the telecom operator denied any breach in its servers.

A sample of the leaked database was shared on Twitter by cybersecurity researcher Rajshekhar Rajaharia which shows masked details of the subscribers.

Rajaharia also shared a video of an email conversation between Bharti Airtel and the hackers with the name of 'Red Rabbit Team'.

The video shows that the hackers informed Bharti Airtel about the breach in December and demanded money.

"Hackers have claimed that they have access to pan-India data of Airtel subscribers and they only uploaded a sample of subscribers data from Jammu and Kashmir.

"It may be possible that the hacker may have uploaded a shell (malicious software code) in Airtel servers. During the Covid-19 peak period several companies could not focus on security and their data was breached," Rajaharia said.

The hackers also uploaded the subscriber data on a website, but it was not accessible later.

When contacted, a Bharti Airtel spokesperson denied any breach of the company's servers.

"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.

"In fact, the claims made by this group 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," the spokesperson said.