New Delhi: Opposition leaders and cybersecurity experts have urged the Union government to act swiftly and transparently in its probe into the breach of personal data pertaining to 81.5 crore Indians from Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) servers.

As The Wire has reported, this breach came to light after a US cybersecurity firm brought the following details to light: A threat actor with the alias ‘pwn0001’ claimed that they could sell records of 815 million Indians, including names, ages, phone numbers, Aadhaar numbers and addresses. pwn0001 shared a sample, which had 1 lakh phone numbers and Aadhaar numbers. The sample dataset includes personal information of children as young as 10.

Mishi Choudhary, founder of the Software Freedom Law Centre (SFLC), said, “With more government agencies and companies hoovering up greater volumes of data now than ever, data leaks are almost inevitable. Any entity collecting such data should use data-centric security and deploy zero-trust protocols."

"Without a data security plan, we will continue to see sensitive personal information like health and financial data being breached. This will lead to identity theft and other costs amounting to billions," she continued.

Several opposition parties and experts pointed out that this is not the first time an Indian government server has been breached and citizens' personal data compromised. "Aadhaar-based frauds have become quite common in India and yet, the regulator won’t address the problem at hand. UIDAI has virtually ignored the Aadhaar data leaks, while promising us a virtual ID solution that disappeared after the litigation around Aadhaar concluded in the Supreme Court," Srinivas Kodali wrote in The Wire.

Trinamool Congress asked on X why "citizens [are] left exposed and vulnerable to such data breaches when your [Narendra Modi's] government touts its commitment to ironclad data security".

The party named individual ministers responsible for citizens' security, and also asked how the home ministry was "blissfully unaware" of the breach.

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