Explained: How data breach of Justdial's 100 million users was unearthed

In a stock exchange filing on Thursday, Justdial said there had been no data breach of the 100 million users

Last Friday, security researcher Rajshekhar Rajaharia was at home, surfing the web. He landed on the website of Justdial, a provider of local search for different services. 

Rajaharia works with several law enforcement agencies to solve cyber security cases. He immediately realised something was wrong. He found the APIs (application programme interfaces) of the tablet version of Justdial’s website was exposed — this made the personal information of 100-odd million users ‘publicly accessible’. 

This included information such as names, e-mail IDs, mobile numbers, genders, dates of birth, addresses, photos and occupations of the users. “Anyone having access to it (APIs)