36.6 million records breached in India in 2016, says Gemalto report

At a time when the Centre is pushing for Aadhaar-based transactions and digital India, a new report suggests that over 36.6 million records were breached in 2016.

The report names SBI, Axis Bank, IIM Ahmedabad, Adani Power, Ibibo RedBus and IRCTC among the list of Indian entities where the breaches happened.

The report, prepared by digital security solutions provider Gemalto, stated that the record breaches in 2016 were 14 per cent higher than 2015.

“Identity theft and unauthorised access to financial data were the leading type of data breaches in 2016, accounting for 73 per cent of all data breaches. In addition, 61 per cent of the data breaches in 2016 did not disclose the number of compromised records at the time they were reported in India,” Gemalto said.

The Breach Level Index is a global database that tracks data breaches and measures their severity based on multiple dimensions, including the number of records compromised, the type of data, the source of the breach, how the data was used, and whether or not the data was encrypted.

By assigning a severity score to each breach, the Breach Level Index provides a comparative list of breaches, distinguishing data breaches that are not serious versus those that are truly impactful (scores run 1-10).

Featuring in the top 10 breaches of 2016, globally, is the breach in Kerala region, where 34 million Keralites were affected by the massive data leak of sensitive information such as income, name and date of birth.

State Bank of India (SBI) blocked millions of debit cards as a precautionary step after some suspicious transactions were reported.

“Clearly, fraudsters are also shifting from attacks targeted at financial organizations to infiltrating large data bases such as entertainment and social media sites”, said Jason Hart, Vice-President and Chief Technology Officer for Data Protection at Gemalto.

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