Hyderabad: The Cyberabad police investigating data theft cases discovered that the data landed in the hands of the arrested accused after passing through multiple hands, with each of them unaware of the source of the data, raising serious concerns about the original source from which the data was widely circulated in the market.
Police are now focusing on the agencies whose customers' data has been exposed or stolen in order to identify the source of the breach and hold the agencies accountable.
So far, the police has arrested 15 people in three cases in which data on around 70 crore people in the country was discovered to be in their possession. This data was discovered to belong to individuals in around 150 categories.
However, questioning the arrested accused only led the detectives to a few more people who were selling the data. Further investigations turned up other data brokers, and the police discovered that none of them knew the other data brokers.
Because the network links are deep, authorities are checking with banks, financial institutions, e-commerce portals, UPI platforms, and numerous service providers to see how the data acquired from the accused was fed into the market.
Some of the employees or third-party agencies may have stolen the data, or there may have been a data breach by external players, or agencies or third-party companies may have compromised their customers' data with those in the data-supplying business.
According to investigators, the agencies now bear responsibility for the security of their customers' data, which would otherwise subject them to legal action.
