NEW DELHI – The software for the user ID database used by India, consistingof biometrics and personal information of over a billion users have beenhacked by experts.
A three-month-long investigation by *HuffPost Indialinkrevealed that Aadhaar, the software used for maintaining the database byIndia for more than a billion of its users, has been compromised using apatch which automatically disabled security provisions on the software. Thehack was developed in early 2017 and the tutorials could even be found onYouTube.
According to the reports, the patch was available for purchase and could beobtained for as low as INR 2,500. This patch was already in use bydifferent enrollment operators in the country. HuffPost India says that itgained access to one of the copies of this patch and had it checked it withdifferent experts, both from India as well as international.
The patch basically overrides certain security features of the system,empowering enrollment operators with a lot of undue favors. With thispatch, the enrollment operators are able to bypass the biometricidentification and generate the ID numbers without even needing it.Moreover, the patch also overrides the GPS checking, making the enrollmentpossible from any corner of the world.
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A hack like this could be very harmful as this could be used to add fakeentries to a database which otherwise is filled with very important data.Fake identities could be created and then used for malicious purposes. Thehack comes at a very critical time as the government itself was thinking tomove ahead with this Aadhaar software for usage in banking.
As far as the statement from Aadhaar officials is concerned, *BusinessTodaylink*,states that the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) hascompletely turned down the claims.
