Bharti Airtel denies data breach of 375 million users

Reports suggested that details of 375 million Airtel customers, including their phone number, email, address and Aadhaar were available for sale on dark web.

Telecom major Bharti Airtel denied any breach of its security system after reports claimed a major data leak of customers belonging to the telecom player. Airtel claimed that there is no proof to suggest there has been such a leak sayinf that this is a "desperate attempt" to tarnish the brand's reputation.

A girl checks her mobile phone as she walks past the Bharti Airtel office building in Gurugram, on the outskirts of New Delhi. (Reuters)

An Airtel spokesperson told Moneycontrol, “There has been a report alleging that Airtel customer data has been compromised. This is nothing short of a desperate attempt to tarnish Airtel’s reputation by vested interests.

The spokesperson added as per the outlet, "We have done a thorough investigation and can confirm that there has been no breach whatsoever from Airtel systems.”

Unverified reports had suggested that details of 375 million Airtel users, including their phone number, email, address, date of birth, father's name, and Aadhaar number were available for sale on dark web.

Rahul Sasi, CEO of cybersecurity firm CloudSEK said in a LinkedIn post that the actor "has gathered previously leaked data and is falsely claiming it to be a recent breach of Airtel's database".

"Over the past few years, there have been numerous instances of millions of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) being leaked from various providers. Threat actors are aggregating this publicly available leaked information and falsely attributing it to telecom databases. It's important to note that it's relatively easy to compile a database consisting of first names, last names, and phone numbers belonging to any service provider using publicly available datasets," Rahul Sasi said.