Data of around 25 lakh Bharti Airtel subscribers of Jammu and Kashmir, including Aadhaar numbers, address and date of birth, has been allegedly leaked by hackers. Although, the telecom operator denied any breach in its servers. A sample of the leaked database was shared on social media by researcher Rajshekhar Rajaharia that shows masked details of the subscribers.
Rajaharia also shared video of an email conversation between Bharti Airtel NSE 2.51% and the hackers with the name of ‘Red Rabbit Team’.
The video shows the hackers informing Bharti Airtel about the breach during the end of 2020, also demanding money.
“Hackers claims having access to pan-India data of Airtel subscribers and only uploading a sample of it from Jammu and Kashmir.
“Possibility is hacker may have uploaded a shell (malicious software code) in Airtel servers. During the Covid-19 crest period several companies could not focus on security and their data was breached,” Rajaharia said.
The hackers also uploaded the same data on a website, which wasn’t accessible later.
When contacted, a Bharti Airtel spokesperson denied any kind of breaching in 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 us. We have already apprised the relevant authorities of the matter,” the spokesperson said.
