A cyber security researcher from India found sensitive personal data of over 20,000 people on the Dark Web and he tweeted that all such data have been leaked by a government department. It includes their name, age, gender, phone number, address, date and the result of the COVID-19 test. He also stated that all this data available on Raid Forums website has been put on sale. He tweeted this because he wants to warn people about fraudulent calls and messages and tagged the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, Government of India in his tweet.
The leaked personal information online leads to face issues related to frauds, cyber crimes etc. In order to avoid such issues it is important for us to be careful about sharing our personal information with others.
Google indexed almost 900K public/private government documents in search engines.
The data shown on the Raid Forums website was meant for upload on the Co-WIN portal, while several government departments made the Arogya Setu app mandatory for COVID-19 services.
Data is a new currency in this era. Since the sold personal data of people in the dark web is often exploited by cyber criminals and fraudsters for various kinds of frauds. We have to understand where our data is going, how it reaches there, and how to keep it safe. There are multiple ways to protect our highly sensitive data, it’s just that we need to find them.
Source: The New Indian Express
