Oh My Aadhar! Heights of negligence by the Indian government

I hope you heard about the Aadhar data breach. All it takes is Rs.500($10) and 10 minutes. You have access to private data of a billion Indian citizens.

How did this happen?

Alice lives in a mansion. She is off on a vacation. She gave her house key to Nora who brags to her friends “You know, I have keys to Alice’s mansion.”. Her friends persuade her to give them duplicates of the key in exchange for money. They promise her, they only want to take a look and wouldn’t touch anything. Her friends gave the duplicates to their friends. Eventually, some thieves got the key. They looted Alice’s mansion.

According to the quint, this is what happened with Aadhar. The government appointed certain officials as the admin of the Aadhar portal. Those officials had the authority to appoint any individual as the admin. These individuals didn’t have to be officially authorised or even be a government employee. Once these individuals got access. They gave the same access to another bunch of people. Eventually, our data was compromised.

What did the UIDAI say?

When Alice asked Nora_, “Why did you do this? I trusted you.”_ Nora replied, “Don’t worry? No one took your mansion away. Some of my friends broke my trust”.