Million of Aadhaar Details Leaked: India’s Biggest and Most Trusted Gas Company, Indane Stands at an Answerable Position before the Entire Country

Indane, the forerunner of LPG providers across countless households across India has given away Aadhaar numbers in millions on their website, allegedly owing to a security crunch.

In hot news of substantial criticism, a particular page on their website containing sensitive customer details was open for all, without the login and password hindrance. Every basic security on a portal provides the circumstantial annotations of encapsulation which needs a pass ticket in the form of a login ID and password to get past the obscurity. Static indexing on Google made the accessibility to the page into the company inventory all the more easy.

A Tweet made by French security researcher Baptiste Robert who goes by internet pseudonym Elliot Alderson (the merriest part of news so grave; #Mr.Robottalkingontheworldforalltherightreasons) spoke about this momentary security shutdown by sharing screenshots of tabular customer details. A shocking 5.8 million customer records were captured by Robert through a customized script right before it was blocked and taken down. Extensive research by TechCrunch, one of the biggest technical online publishers in America also showed positive matches between UIDAI’s customer database and the retrieved details through the script. Nobody knows for sure how long this open-source turbulence went on for and what damage it may have caused in terms of intrusion of citizen privacy. Right after the news broke; UIDAI blatantly dismissed the idea of this security rupture and criticized the media attributing this submissive situation as ‘fake news’ and an unjustified legal challenge against them. No surprises here.

Robert has shared his investigative findings in a personal blog post where he estimates that this crunch would have cost around 6.7 million customer details to be left out in the open. Indane, one of the largest LPG distributers in India with a customer count nearing 90 million has hit their second lapse with this stance. Only last year, they were under scrutiny for letting out data through a virtual endpoint that was linked directly to Aadhaar’s database. However, even after this steep fall, both Indane and UIDAI have refused to get back to the questions put forward by various media houses, print and digital platforms and the general public.

The confidentiality of an individual has been left to exploit in ways that can cause a direct upheaval of personal, social and political discrepancies. Some years ago, when the government put a weighty impetus on every countryman to get their Aadhaar number registered, it was supposedly a light at the end of the tunnel. Now that we are moving towards what can be called an economic refurbishing for India, the safety pin of national contingency is far from its promised beneficial-syndromes of change.

Times are not just sad, it is scary.