Raj govt fixes website bugs exposing residents’ sensitive Jan Aadhaar info

New Delhi: Rajasthan government has fixed security issues impacting its website related to Jan Aadhaar that exposed millions of residents' personal information and sensitive documents.

Jan Aadhaar is a state programme that provides a single identifier to families and individuals in Rajasthan so that they can access the welfare schemes.

Aadhaar cards, birth and marriage certificates, electricity bills, income statements, and personal information, such as date of birth, gender and father's name, were exposed by the bugs, TechCrunch reported.

The bugs were found by the cybersecurity company CloudDefense.ai security researcher Viktor Markopoulos in the Jan Aadhaar portal in December.

The bugs were resolved last week through an intervention by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, or CERT-In, the report mentioned.

"This is to inform you that we have received a response from the concerned authority that the reported vulnerability has been fixed,” the agency was quoted as saying.

According to the researcher, a bug allowed anyone to access personal documents and information if they knew the phone number of the registrant.

The other flaw was causing the server to improperly validate one-time passwords, which allowed sensitive data to be returned.

The state's Jan Aadhaar portal, launched in 2019, clams that it has over 78 million individual registrants and 20 million families. The portal aims to provide "One Number, One Card, One Identity" to the residents of Rajasthan which can be used to access various state government welfare schemes.

Meanwhile, researchers have uncovered a highly-sophisticated cyber-espionage campaign, 'Operation RusticWeb', which the threat actors are using to target various personnel within the Indian government to steal confidential documents.

The campaign, first detected in October 2023, uses Rust-based malware and encrypted PowerShell commands, to exfiltrate confidential documents, according to Seqrite, the enterprise arm of global cybersecurity solutions provider, Quick Heal.