The Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) website is the latest government-run body to get caught in a data leak scare. The Aadhaar details of over 2 crore members of the EPFO, who had linked their PF accounts to their Aadhaar numbers, was reportedly stolen by hackers in March.
According to a report in Business Standard, confidential data of formal sector employees enrolled under the EPFO was stolen by hackers, forcing EPFO to temporarily shut the Aadhaar-seeding portal. The Labour and Employment Ministry was informed about the alleged data theft by the Intelligence Bureau (IB).
Meanwhile, the retirement fund body said it has discontinued Aadhaar-seeding portal services provided through Common Service Centre (CSC) “pending vulnerability checks” and ruled out any leakage of subscribers’ data from a government website. CSC comes under the Ministry of Electronics and IT.
“Warnings regarding vulnerabilities in data or software is a routine administrative process based on which the services which were rendered through CSC have been discontinued from March 22, 2018,” said an EPFO statement issued after the report went viral. It said the report is related to the services through CSC and not about EPFO software or data centre.
Source: Business Today
