India's 'Biggest Data Theft': From Netflix To BYJU's, Data Of Over 66 Crore People Stolen

New Delhi: Cyberbad police in Telengana have busted a big data theft network, which is believed to have over data of over 66.9 crore people and firms. One person was arrested by the police in relation to the case. It is expected that the data is divided into 104 categories and belonged to people of over 24 states and 8 metropolitan cities. The accused is identified as Vinay Bhadwaj. He was hiding his data theft under his website “Inspirewebz” and based at Faridabad, Harayan. He sold the dataset to the clients via cloud drive links.

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“The accused has been found to possess data from various sources, including Byjus, Vedantu, cab users,GST, RTO, Amazon,Netflix,Paytm, Phonepe etc. The accused was operating through a website called 'InspireWebz' based in Faridabad, Haryana, and was selling the database to clients,” Cyberabad Police tweeted.

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“The accused had been holding data from 135 categories containing sensitive information of government, private organizations, and individuals, and the police seized two mobile phones, two laptops, and the data during the arrest,” It added.

#CyberabadPolice busted a data theft gang who has been involved in the theft, procurement, holding, and selling of personal and confidential data of 66.9 crore individuals and organizations across 24 states and 8 metropolitan cities. pic.twitter.com/Y6bdOfbGUF — Cyberabad Police (@cyberabadpolice) April 1, 2023

The accussed stole the personal and sensitive data illegally and then sold in the market. The perpetrator has the data of students of ed-tech firms BYJU’s and Vedantu. The accused also held the customer data fo major organisation like GST (Pan India), RTO (Pan India), Amazon, Netflix, Paytm, Instagram, Zomato, Policy Bazar, etc.