NEW DELHI: Bharti Airtel, India’s second-largest telecom operator refuted any breach of its systems on Friday after misleading reports emerged that claimed the latter has suffered a security lapse which left millions of users at risk.
The telecom group, which also serves enterprise productivity and security solutions to businesses, said it carried out a careful investigation but claimed that there was no breach on any of Airtel’s systems.
Airtel, with nearly 375 million customers in India also rubbished the media reports about any such alleged breach as “completely baseless & false and nothing but a figment of imagination by some vested interests who are out to malign our brand.
The statement of the company was issued to deny rumours surrounding their alleged data breach, which resulted in worries from its subscribed customers as it circulated over local media outlets and social networks.
This week, a self-proclaimed data broker took to a prominent cybercrime forum claiming they were is in possession of what was allegedly the personal information of 375 million individuals – including phone numbers, email addresses, Aadhaar identification numbers and residential address.
Earlier in the week, TechCrunch viewed a sample of data from one broker and found an apparent issue with its entries. Doubts have also been raised by some security researchers as to the validity of the reported attack.
“We don’t think it’s an Airtel database. It seems to be an aggregated database from multiple sources, and the actor is trying to sell it as an Airtel database,” said Rahul Sasi, founder and CEO of cybersecurity startup CloudSEK, based on his analysis of the data sample.
