Earlier this week, India’s telecom operator Reliance Jio allegedly experienced a data breach after personal details of some of the Jio subscribers were leaked on a website, ‘Magicapk.com.’ The breach was first reported by technology website Fonarena.com. Following which, a Jio spokeswoman said that they had informed the law enforcement agencies about the claims of the website, and are going to follow through to ensure strict action is taken against the perpetrator. Now, a new report suggests that the police have apparently cracked the case.
As reported by Midday, the Navi Mumbai investigation team has zeroed in on the 25-year-old Pintoo Chimpa in Rajasthan as being the primary link to the given data-breach. The man has reportedly been detained and a team of five police personnel has already left for Churu — a village 300km away from Jaipur, to take custody of the accused. Additional SP from Churu, Yogendra Faujdar has confirmed the news information, the report added.
"The prime suspect of the data theft case is in our custody. The detained person has been kept under vigil within the additional SP office premises and we are waiting for Navi Mumbai police team to reach here so that he can be handed over to them," Faujdar told Midday.
Users have been registered on the Reliance Jio network using a 12-digit Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) provided number, commonly known as the 'Aadhaar' number. The 'Aadhaar' number, which works on the similar lines as Social Security numbers in the US, is unique to every Indian citizen and stores biometric and demographic data of the user at a centralised database.
The data breach pose a large setback for the Indian telecom entrant's aggressive push led by Reliance Chairman Mukesh Ambani, which added 3.9 million subscribers to its network in April. Many users on Monday, 10th July complained on Twitter about personal information of millions of Jio users being publicly available on Magicapk.com, in what appears to be the first of its kind large-scale data breach of an Indian telecom operator. Reliance Jio hasn’t provided any comments on this matter as yet.
