Globally, we all are facing a digital security threat. And India’s Digitization drive is also affected in it. India had its fair share of security breaches in 2018. This triggers a want for tighter security and better data governance.
According to some reports, India stood second this year in the Global numbers of data breaches. The most controversial of them are as follows:
Aadhar
At the beginning of 2018, India faced the most controversial data breaches of all time. The breach that took place in January bypassed the Aadhar security system, leaked citizen information of nearly 1.1 billion Indians. The hackers allegedly used a bug in the system to enter 12 digit numbers and getting the information of Aadhar card holders. The information leaked includes name address, email address, photos, and phone numbers.
However, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) refuted the allegations about the breach saying that Aadhar information cannot be updated without the citizen’s biometric details.
Quora
Earlier in December of 2018, the online question-answer platform revealed that a malicious third party may have acquired unauthorized access over 100 million users’ personal information.
The leaked information included usernames, e-mail addresses, encrypted passwords, data imported from linked networks, non-public content and actions including answer requests, and direct messages of certain users.
Quora, in its official blog post, apologized its users for the security breach and asked the affected users via e-mail to log out and invalidate their old passwords.
Google saw three instances of a data breach this year. Amidst all these breaches the tech giant said that it will shut down its social networking effort Google+.
According to reports, Google identified a bug that may have shared data of nearly 500,000 users of Google+ from 2015 till March of 2018. However, the problem was fixed and the breach was allegedly kept in the dark because of the damage it could inflict on the company’s reputation.
Soon after Google’s second data breach, Facebook reported that pictures shared by nearly 6.8 million users could have been exposed over a span of 12 days.
Nearly 50 million records were compromised in the breach including identities, gender, localities associated with the user profiles that occurred due to attackers misusing Facebook’s APIs to fetch user information. The breach was the company’s largest data breach so far.
Facebook apologized for the leak and floated certain tools for app developers allowing them to identify apps that have been affected by the bug.
Those were the most controversial data breaches of 2018. Hope suitable measures are taken and such instances of user data breach can be avoided in the future.
