Reliance Jio breach: Accused wanted to set up search engine with customer data, says report

The man who was arrested from Rajasthan in connection with Reliance Jio customer data leak case wanted to create a search engine with the information, The Indian Express reported quoting unidentified police officials. The accused, Imran Chhimpa, had planned to compile data from all telecom operators in the country.

The accused had not made any attempts to hide his digital trail, the Maharashtra Cyber Department said. Chhimpa, who had studied Computer Applications, had gained access to a retailer’s user ID and password through which he managed to access customer data and put it on a website, Navi Mumbai Deputy Commissioner of Police Tushar Doshi told PTI.

However, he was unable to access all the customer data. “The most you could learn from search results was the region in which the customer’s phone was active,” The Indian Express quoted an official as saying.

The Navi Mumbai Police has booked Chhimpa for theft and for introducing a virus into Jio’s system. “His plan was to create a search engine comprising numbers of cellphone users of all telecom firms. But he had not figured how to acquire data from other firms,” said the officer.

Doshi further said that the theft case against Chhimpa will be dropped since he had not downloaded data from the server, but had only accessed the data illegally.

“We are interrogating him to ascertain the purpose for which he had obtained these cards,” Balsingh Rajput, superintendent of Maharashtra Police’s cyber department, told PTI.

Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd on Wednesday for the first time acknowledged in a police complaint that there had been a breach in its systems on Sunday. The company’s complaint said that the accused had gained “unlawful access to its systems”.

The breach

Customer data, including phone numbers, email address and/or Aadhaar details, were leaked on a website on Sunday. The URL was later blocked. Jio had called reports of the data leak “unsubstantiated claims”.

The mobile network has more than 120 million users in India, potentially making this the biggest data breach ever in India. However, Reliance Jio had initially claimed its customer data was safe.