Govt pension portal for defence personnel SPARSH suffers data breach

Adding to a series of data breaches over recent months, the dedicated government pension portal for defence personnel, SPARSH, recently suffered a data breach.

The digitised pension processing system, SPARSH, offers online pension-related facilities to over 3 million pensioners from 50 organisations, including the Border Roads Organisation and Military Intelligence.

While the exact details of the breach were not disclosed, a post on the messaging platform Telegram mentioned data such as usernames, passwords, pension numbers, and more.

In response to an email query from Business Standard, CERT-In stated, "We are already in the process of taking appropriate action with the concerned authority."

Several retired service personnel reported being unable to access the portal on Tuesday.

Threat actors have put up the leaked data for sale on the dark web and online platforms like Telegram, including some Russian marketplaces.

The SPARSH portal offers services such as Personal Data Verification (PDV) and life certificate verification, which is based on the biometric data of the pensioners. It also maintains a repository of important pension-related documents, including pension orders and slips, highlighting the significance of the leak.

Government portals in India have experienced data breaches in the past few months. In October last year, the Indian Council of Medical Research witnessed a massive data breach where personally identifiable information of 815 million Indians was put up for sale on the dark web.