'Desperate attempt to tarnish Airtel’s reputation': Telco denies massive data breach allegations, assures user data is safe

Airtel India has denied allegations of a significant data breach, which claimed that the personal data of 375 million Indian users was available for sale on the dark web. The company reassured its users that their private information remains secure and dismissed these claims as false. An Airtel spokesperson informed Business Today that a preliminary investigation confirmed no breach of Airtel’s system.

Airtel spokesperson told Business Today, “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. We have done a thorough investigation and can confirm that there has been no breach whatsoever from Airtel systems.”

The controversy arose from a post by Dark Web Informer on X.com, where an agent named xenZen allegedly offered a dataset of 375 million Airtel India users on a community called BreachForums.

The dataset reportedly included names, family details, address, alternate contact information, nationality, gender and Aadhaar numbers. Interestingly, xenZen also claimed responsibility for the recent Indian Ministry of External Affairs data leak, which allegedly involved around 200,000 user records from the ministry’s eMigrate portal. However, the hacker’s claims in both incidents have yet to be verified. The complete data pile has been put on sale at a price of $50,000 (Roughly Rs 41.74 lakh). However, Airtel has strongly denied any breach from their end.

Notably, the hacker hasn't been able to produce any evidence for the data breach. The tweet that shared the screengrabs of the data had completely blurred any details. 

🚨MAJOR DATA LEAK FOR SALE🚨xenZen is allgedly selling data belonging to Airtel India.

375 million Airtel India customers details including phone, email, address, parents name, gov ID (Aadhaar,etc.) updated to June 2024.

Industry: Telecommunications
Breached in: June 2024
Data… pic.twitter.com/2V9JHDcPBF

— Dark Web Informer (@DarkWebInformer) July 3, 2024