Airtel India has strongly denied claims of a data breach, which alleged that the data of 375 million Airtel India users was put up for sale on the dark web. According to Dark Web Informer on X (formerly Twitter), an agent named xenZen is allegedly selling data belonging to Airtel India customers.
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Alleged Data Breach
The alleged data breach includes 375 million customer details updated until June 2024. The breach, claimed to have occurred in June 2024, includes data fields such as mobile number, name, date of birth, father's name, local address, permanent address, alternate number, email ID, gender, nationality, connection type, SIM activation date, Aadhaar, photo ID proof details, and address proof details. This data, belonging to Airtel India customers, is being sold for USD 50,000 in XMR.
Dark Web Informer posted screenshots from a community called BreachForums, where an unauthentic data hacker account has posted about the sale of the latest Airtel India customer database. Incidentally, the seller also claimed to be behind the recent Indian Ministry of External Affairs data leak.
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Airtel India's Response
"There has been 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," Airtel told TelecomTalk.
Verification Challenges
TelecomTalk independently tried to verify the claims and screenshots. However, despite multiple attempts we failed to activate the community account on BreachForums after registering, as we did not receive the account activation email. Therefore, we were unable to verify any details or the authenticity of the claims.
