Bharti Airtel Denies Its Biggest Data Breach Allegations

Bharti Airtel, the Telecom giant, has denied any data breach in its systems that may have leaked over 375 million users’ personal data.

Bharti Airtel is one of the biggest telecom companies in India and boasts a huge consumer base of 496.96 million. The numbers reflect its user audience from 18 countries across South Asia and Africa region. Recently, a threat actor named xenZen was identified selling Bharti Airtel users’ personal information on a Dark Web forum. The company has, however, denied allegations of such a huge data breach.

“Basis preliminary investigation we can confirm that there has been no data breach whatsoever of Airtel system” an Airtel spokesperson told a famous news and media website.

Unverified reports suggest that over 375 million users’ data might be at risk of leakage, including their personal information like phone number, email address, personal address, and Aadhar number. This data can be utilized by any illegal activity organization to harm the Indian public in multiple ways. The leaked data is available for anyone willing to pay a sum of $50,000 for the information.

Independent researchers have verified the authenticity of uploaded data but could not trace it to Bharti Airtel’s servers. Lately, many mainstream Indian websites have become victims of data hacks and breaches, mainly focused on retrieving the personal information of Indian citizens. According to Athlesian’s research reports on recent data breach activities, the source of these breaches is traced back to Indonesia. Lulzsec Muslim, Mr. D1CK, Anonymous Sudan, and Garuda are the most common threat actors’ names that were involved in the data breach activities.

"The attacks are not just focused on bringing down Government websites and defacing them but also compromising critical infrastructure organizations in India, stealing confidential data, leaking information such as posting and deployment of Armed Forces troops, and sensitive information of law enforcement and intelligence agencies officials deployed on secret missions,"

- Kanishk Gaur, chief executive officer of Athenian Tech

While third-party information storage servers are out of users’ control to prevent leakage, they can always choose to remove their publicly available data through requests from their service companies. Owing to the rapidly rising trend of data breach hacktivism, it is essential to know how to protect your data from such attacks.