Maharashtra Winter Session: Have we developed a 'reporting mechanism', asks Aaditya Thackeray on data leak

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Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Aaditya Thackeray on Friday raised the issue of Aadhaar data leak in the ongoing winter session of the Maharashtra Assembly.

Speaking in the Vidhan Bhavan in Nagpur, Aaditya Thackeray asked whether the government has developed any 'reporting mechanism' to take action against the culprits.

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"There were reports suggesting that details of over 80 crore Aadhaar cards were leaked. People download many apps nowadays and their personal data can be breached from that. I want to ask the state government that is state government in co-ordination with the Central government developing a 'reporting mechanism' to take action against such apps and culprits", he asked.

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Earlier, a report by US-based cybersecurity firm Resecurity has claimed that personal identifiable information of about 815 million which is 81.5 crore Indians has been leaked on the dark web.

The United States-based global cybersecurity solutions provider, published a report claiming "millions of personally identifiable information (PII) records, including Aadhaar cards, belonging to Indian residents, (are) being offered for sale on the Dark Web."

In a blog post published on October 15, Resecurity said a "threat actor" (identified as 'pwn0001') was brokering access to these records, and that these were available for sale for USD 80,000.

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As per the report, data including names, phone numbers, addresses, Aadhaar, passport information are for sale online.

The data allegedly on sale also included age, gender and addresses of millions of Indian citizens.

The same post also claimed a leak from August - brokered by a "threat actor" called 'Lucius' - offered 1.8TB of data "impacting an unnamed India internal law enforcement organization".

There were at least three instances of large-scale Aadhaar leaks last year, including one in which farmers' data stored on the PM Kisan website, were reportedly made available on the dark web.