EPFO Data hacked - Fusion - WeRIndia

About 2.7 crore people have recently had their personal and professional details exposed to data theft.

These people are registered members of the Employees Provident Fund Organization (EPFO), a retirement fund body.

The Central Provident Fund Commissioner wrote a letter to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology about this breach.

In this letter, he said that hackers have stolen data from the EPFO’s Aadhaar seeding portal.

He also asked the technical team of the ministry to plug any vulnerabilities on the EPFO’s Aadhaar portal.

This portal has now been temporarily shut. It links the employees’ Aadhaar numbers with their provident fund accounts.

In his letter, the Central Provident Fund Commissioner said that they were informed by the Intelligence Bureau (IB) that hackers were exploiting the vulnerabilities prevailing in the EPFO’s Aadhaar portal. The details and the scale of this breach are still unknown.

However, it is known that the website contains information such as the names, addresses, and employment histories of EPFO subscribers.

Cybersecurity expert Anand Venkatnarayan said that every person contributes 12% of his or her salary as provident fund (PF).

This means that salary details could have been stolen as well. Since people tend to withdraw their PF, bank account numbers could also have been stolen.

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has said that it has nothing to do with the breach on the EPFO’s Aadhaar portal.

They said that there is no breach into the Aadhaar database of the UIDAI, so Aadhaar data is still secure and safe.

However, this is only one in a series of government websites that have been hacked in the past year.

Between April 2017 and January 2018, a total of 114 government websites were hacked, according to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.

The CEO of the cybersecurity firm Secugenius, Kshitij Adlakha, has said that these breaches happen because the government is more reactive than proactive.

He urges that the government take more security measures in the initial stages, so that breaches like this can be prevented ahead of time and people can always know that their information is safe.

Image credit: Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay (Free for commercial use)

Image Reference: https://pixabay.com/it/illustrations/hacked-sicurezza-internet-1753263/