Indian police bust gang for data 'theft' of 669M individuals, organizations

Police in India’s southern Telangana state busted a gang involved in the "theft, procurement, holding, and selling" of personal and confidential data of 669 million individuals and organizations, a senior police official said on Sunday.

Kalmeshwar Shingenavar, a senior police official in the state, told Anadolu over the phone that police have so far arrested 10 people from three Indian states.

“The data was used mostly for marketing, advertisements, and cybercrimes. It is, apparently, the biggest data theft busted in the country so far,” he said.

He noted that the investigation is now focused on how the accused got access to this huge data. Shingenavar also said that they are approaching several companies to find out how the data was leaked from their databases.

According to Cyberabad police in Telangana state, the gang is involved in the data theft of 669 million individuals and organizations across 24 states and eight metropolitan cities.

It said the accused possessed data from various sources, including India's largest ed-tech company Byjus, online tutoring platform Vedantu, cab users, salaried employees, Amazon, Netflix, India's largest mobile payment providers like Paytm, and Phonepe, as well as defense employees.

“The accused had been holding data from 135 categories containing sensitive information of government, private organizations, and individuals, and the police also seized two mobile phones, two laptops, and the data during the arrest,” said a statement by police.

It also said the main accused was "operating through a website called 'InspireWebz' based in Faridabad, Haryana, and was selling the database to clients through cloud drive links."

In the recent past, a number of data breach cases have come to the fore.

In December last year, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, to a question about "Rising Incidence of Data Breaches," told the Indian parliament that "the policies of the government are aimed at ensuring an open, safe, trusted and accountable Internet for its users."

“With the expansion of the Internet, more and more Indians coming online and increase in the volume of data generated, stored and processed, instances of data breaches have also grown,” the ministry said.