3.2 Million Indian Debit Cards Compromised and Nobody knew about it

Many Indians are falling prey to what is now becoming the biggest breach of financial data in the recent times. Indian debit cards are being used to make payments at various outlets in China! This could very well be the biggest debit card scam in India.

Economic Times claims nearly 3.2 millions card details have been breached owing to a malware that affected Hitachi Payment Services. It took nearly 6 weeks for this to be unearthed, financial data needs to be secured with industry leading technology but Indians have always taken privacy & security for granted. Several people have complained of unauthorized use of their debit cards in China, but it has taken the authorities several weeks to connect the dots. This may also point to the malware originating from China.

Darknet Connection

Recently, RedBus was breached and hackers were sharing the breached info on the darknet. RedBus had the audacity to assure customers that their data was not affected while the hackers went all out on the customer data via the darknet.

Our in-house Darknet enthusiast, Vignesh (for obvious reasons) skimmed through various sites via TOR but could not find any trace of the breached financial details. There were people offering financial data of Indian card users but those were obtained prior to this hack & were no way related to the Hitachi compromise.

ET goes on to explain that 2.6 million of the affected cards are said to be on the Visa and Master-Card platform and 600,000 on the RuPay platform. The worst-hit of the card-issuing banks are State Bank of India, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, YES Bank and Axis Bank.

A forensic audit has now been ordered by Payments Council of India on Indian bank servers and systems to detect the origin of frauds that might have hit customer accounts.
SBI has blocked several cards that they believe were compromised and have started providing replacements.

There is no sure way to know if you’re affected or not, but now is a good time to take some precautionary measures to secure your financial data.

• Change your debit card/ATM PIN immediately.
• Change your net banking password.
• Switch to a Chip based card. Request your bank to provide you with a Chip based card instead of the usual strip based ones.
• DO NOT share your card details with anyone on call or on websites that you do not recognise. Always make purchases on reputed sites.

We hope user data & privacy is taken more seriously in India than ever before. Now is the time.