Telengana Police struggling with theft of personal data

Police probing the theft of personal data of over 16 crore Indians has now approached Google to allow them access to its cloud service where most of the data was saved by the accused. On Thursday, Cyberabad cops had arrested seven persons from in and around Delhi for illegally accessing and selling personal data of individuals.

“We have written to Google to make sure all the data stored by the accused is preserved and no modifications are made. We will know the extent of information stolen only after forensic analysis of the data in the cloud,”‘ one of the investigating officers told TOI on condition of anonymity.

ops said that the arrested accused – Kumar Nitish Bhushan, Kumari Pooja Pal, Susheel Thomar, Atul Pratap Singh, Muskan Hassan, Sandeep Pal and Zia Ur Rehman – had stored data in cloud as well as in hard disks.

Officials said data was marked in various categories such as eligible students for NEET exam, businessmen, corporate executives, bank customers, PAN card users, government employees of different states, defence personnel, professionals from different fields etc. Volume of data is so huge that officials said they were finding it difficult to open. Cops are waiting to get custody of accused to interrogate them on modus operandi and find out the buyers.

Cyberabad police is also in the process of alerting various government departments on the breach. ToI