815 Million Indians’ Aadhaar Data Exposed on the Dark Web

A massive data breach has occurred, resulting in the leak of personal information belonging to 815 million Indian citizens on the dark web.

The compromised data includes personally identifiable information, which can pose a serious threat to the privacy and security of the affected individuals.

Millions of Indians have had their personal information compromised, including their Aadhaar and passport details, names, phone numbers, and temporary and permanent addresses.

According to the Resecurity report, “a hacker using the name ‘pwn0001’ disclosed details about the breach on Breach Forums on October 9. They advertised the availability of 815 million records (81.5 crore).”

Threat actor pwn0001 claims to have over 815 million Aadhaar records

Investigation of the Data

The HUNTER team conducted an investigation and reached out to hackers. They revealed they were willing to sell the complete dataset of Aadhaar and Indian passport information for as high as $80,000.

The data offered by the hacker includes the following details;

Fields
Name
Fathers name
PhoneNumber
Other numbers
Passport number
AadharNumber
Age
Gender
Address
District
Pincode
State

The method used by the ‘Pwn0001’ actor to obtain those records has yet to be precise. However, HUNTER verified that the Aadhaar Card IDs are indeed valid and correspond to the “Verify Aadhaar” feature.

pwn0001 shares spreadsheet with 4 large leak samples containing fragments of Aadhaar data

The recent large-scale disclosure of personally identifiable information (PII) of Indian citizens on the Dark Web poses a serious threat to digital identity protection.

Malicious actors can use this confidential data to carry out various financially motivated cyber attacks, including but not limited to online banking fraud and e-tax refund scams.

Individuals and organizations alike need to take proactive measures to secure their sensitive information and prevent such data breaches from happening in the first place.

On underground cybercriminal forums, Resecurity noticed an increase in occurrences of Aadhaar IDs being leaked by threat actors to cause harm to Indian nationals and residents.

Protect yourself from vulnerabilities using Patch Manager Plus to patch over 850 third-party applications quickly. Try a free trial to ensure 100% security.

Guru Baran

Gurubaran KS is a cybersecurity analyst, and Journalist with a strong focus on emerging threats and digital defense strategies. He is the Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Cyber Security News, where he leads editorial coverage on global cybersecurity developments.