The Delhi Police has arrested four persons from three states in connection with the Indian Council of Medical Research data leak case.
The arrest occurred more than two months after central intelligence agencies found that personal details, including Aadhaar and passport records, of over 81 crore Indians were purportedly leaked from the data bank of the Indian Council of Medical Research and offered for sale on the dark web.
During questioning, the suspects claimed to have also stolen data of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Computerised National Identity Card (CNIC) — Pakistan’s Aadhaar counterpart — The Indian Express reported.
“Last week, four men — a B.Tech degree holder from Odisha, two school dropouts from Haryana and one from Jhansi — were arrested and produced before a Delhi court which remanded them in seven days police custody,” a senior officer in a central agency said to Indian Express.
“The arrested persons told investigators during initial questioning that they met on a gaming platform around three years ago and became friends. They then decided to earn quick money,” the officer said.
The officer went on to say: “The matter was reported to the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), the national nodal agency to deal with cyber security threats such as hacking and phishing, which in turn first verified with the departments concerned about the authenticity of the data and asked them to match with the actual data. They found there was data of around 1 lakh people as a sample from which they picked data of 50 people for verification and found them matching.”
“They are in police custody, but officials of all central agencies are also questioning them and trying to find out how they stole the data,” the official said.
