Data belonging to millions of Indian citizens who had signed up for a mobile payment app called BHIM may have been put at risk of misuse after it was left exposed and unencrypted in a misconfigured Amazon S3 storage bucket.
Researchers at VPN review service vpnMentor recently discovered the S3 bucket connected to a website that is being used to promote adoption of the payment app and to sign up new individual users and merchant businesses.
In a report, vpnMentor described the storage bucket as containing 409GB of data representing some 7.26 million records containing information needed to open a BHIM account. The data included scans of national ID cards; photos used as proof of residence; professional certificates, degrees, and diplomas; and names, date of birth, and religion. Also included in the data set were ID numbers for government programs and biometric identifiers such as fingerprint scans.
The personal user data contained in the dataset provided "a complete profile of individuals, their finances, and banking records," vpnMentor said. "Having such sensitive financial data in the public domain or the hands of criminal hackers would make it incredibly easy to trick, defraud, and steal from the people exposed," it noted.
In addition to data on individuals, the S3 bucket also contained "massive CSV lists" with information on merchants that had signed up for BHIM and the IDs used by business owners to make payment transfers via the app. Similar IDs belonging to over 1 million individuals may also have been potentially exposed via the misconfigured S3 bucket. Such IDs make it much easier for h ..
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