EPFO Data Leak? Aadhaar Details of Employees PF Stolen by Hackers Exploiting Vulnerabilities
Joy's letter dated March 23 and marked "secret" and addressed to Dinesh Tyagi, CEO of Common Service Centre surfaced online, which claimed that hackers exploited vulnerabilities of aadhaar.epfoservices.com, to steal data.
THE government's Common Service Centres (CSCs) scheme, which employs rural entrepreneurs to offer a slew of digital services to those in the hinterlands, has come under the scanner for the second time in four months with the Aadhaar-seeding portal built for Employees' Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) being suspended after suspected security-related "vulnerabilities".
The retirement fund body said that "warnings regarding vulnerabilities in data or software is a routine administrative process based on the services which were rendered through Common Services Centres have been discontinued with effect from March 22, 2018".
To recall, the retirement fund body has been seeding Aadhaar with Universal Account (PF) Numbers of its subscribers to improve delivery of services. The website links the Aadhaar number of employees with their provident fund accounts. "As part of the data security and protection, EPFO has taken advance action by closing the server and host service through Common Service Centres pending vulnerability checks", EPFO said in a formal statement.
The body that governs Aadhaar, UIDAI, has clarified that it has nothing to do with the alleged data breach from aadhaar.epfoservices.com.
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The above-mentioned letter had further requested CSC to "immediately" deploy its "technical team in order to plug in the identified as well as other vulnerabilities if any" in the website.
"A day before I wrote the letter, we stopped their service and the server".
The breaches have been in direct contrast to UIDAI's statements in the court where one of the clarifications was that the Aadhaar data is protected by 13 Ft high and 5 Ft thick walls. On the letter sent to him by EPFO's Joy, Tyagi said, "The letter was sent to us but this was basically saying that somebody has pointed out vulnerabilities in the system, so, therefore we are disabling this service and kindly look into it. A vulnerability has been pointed out, and so we will (undertake) the exercise to plug the vulnerability, if it is there", said the official who did not wish to be named.
There is absolutely no breach in the Aadhaar database of UIDAI.
Amid harsh stance shown during Facebook-Cambridge Analytica debacle, the continuous Aadhaar leaks should have provoked action as well as criticism of weak data security, however, all Indians have got till now is "Aadhaar is safe".
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