- Indian security researcher discovered a misconfiguration issue in Indian COVID-19 data portals leaking PII of 9 Lakh citizens.
- Data from Haryana’s COVID websites was exposed, allowing unauthorized access to personal details and test results.
- Authorities have patched the vulnerability, but the leaked data is available on search engines and dark web, posing a risk of exploitation and scams.
Cyber Security Threat: This month, an Indian security researcher has spotted a misconfiguration issue in one of India’s COVID-19 data portals, that leaked the PII of over 9 Lakh citizens!
The easy-to-exploit vulnerability was now patched by the relevant authorities, after being responsibly disclosed. While it’s secured now, the government has not informed the public of this incident yet and is not immediately acting on the public display of concerned URLs. It’s found that the data was stolen, and is made available for free in several dark web marketplaces.
Leakage of Indians’ COVID-19 Data
For a long, we’ve seen numerous instances of cloud databases leaking senstive data stored in them due to improper configuration. While it’s a shame for the server managers, leaking such databases due to very basic issues is more concerning. And it just happened with Indian authorities, who left personally identifiable data of over 20,000 citizens in wild.
As seen and reported by Sourajeet Majumder, an Indian security researcher, the COVID websites of Haryana – Covid Sample Report Portal and the Covid-19 Sero Survey Portal – are tagged as the primary culprits here.
🧵 How a misconfig let anyone view PII of Covid-19 patients and modify data related to Covid-19 sero survey (Of Haryana) So, the Govt Of Haryana has 2 state projects under the @_DigitalIndia programme called : 1. Covid Sample Report Portal 2. Covid-19 Sero Survey Portal (1/13) pic.twitter.com/9tWpzhsn4g — Sourajeet (@TechCrucio) January 13, 2022
