Thousands of Indian bank transfer records found spilling online after security lapse

Summary

A data spill from an unsecured cloud server has exposed hundreds of thousands of sensitive bank transfer documents in India, revealing account numbers, transaction figures, and individuals’ contact details. Researchers at cybersecurity firm UpGuard discovered in late August a publicly accessible Amazon-hosted storage server containing 273,000 PDF documents relating to bank transfers of Indian customers. The exposed files contained completed transaction forms intended for processing via the National Automated Clearing House, or NACH, a centralized system used by banks in India to facilitate high-volume recurring transactions, such as salaries, loan repayments, and utility payments. The data was linked to at least 38 different banks and financial institutions, the researchers told TechCrunch. The spilling data was eventually plugged, but the researchers said they could not identify the source of the leak. Following the publication of this article, Indian fintech company NuPay reached out to TechCrunch by email to confirm that it “addressed a configuration gap in an Amazon S3 storage bucket” that contained the bank transfer forms. It’s not clear why the data was left publicly exposed and accessible to the internet, though security lapses of this nature are not uncommon due to human error. Data secured, NuPay blames ‘configuration gap’ In its blog post detailing its findings, the UpGuard researchers said that out of a sample of 55,000 documents that they looked at, more than half of the files mentioned the name of Indian lender Aye Finance, which had filed for a $171 million IPO last year. The Indian state-owned State Bank of India was the next institution to appear by frequency in the sample documents, according to the researchers. After discovering the exposed data, UpGuard’s researchers notified Aye Finance through its corporate, customer care, and grievance redressal email addresses. The researchers also alerted the National Payments Corporation of India, or NPCI, t...