The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and various other agencies involved in the country’s largest banking security breach are taking a lot of heat. In a recent development, the Finance Ministry has asked them to submit their reports regarding the violation in the next 8-10 days.“We expect result of the technical enquiry in the next 8-10 days. This will give us exact picture of the entire incidence. It will give us lead as to where hacking or compromise took place,” a Finance Ministry source said.
Without specifying any date, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had earlier this week asked India’s central bank and other agencies to provide details of the data breach and also inform his ministry about banks’ preparedness to deal with cyber crimes.
The report to be submitted to the ministry will likely be a technical enquiry report and would be talking on the lines of the hacking details of the breach involving over 32 lakh debit cards.
Taking serious note of the threat, several banks, including state-owned State Bank of India (SBI), have recalled a number of cards while many others blocked the ones suspected to have been compromised. Customers have also been asked to change their personal identification number (PIN) before use.
Furthermore, 19 banks have reported fraudulent withdrawals. Complaints have been received from a few banks that their customers’ cards were used fraudulently abroad, mainly in China and the US while the customers were in India.
Data outsourced from the National Payments Corporation of India says that as many as 641 customers across 19 banks have been duped of Rs 1.3 crore.
India nearly has around 60 crore operational debit cards, of which 19 crore are indigenously developed by RuPay while the rest are Visa- and Master Card-enabled.
Of the debit cards affected, about 26.5 lakh are on Visa and MasterCard platforms while 600,000 are on RuPay. The breach reportedly involved some 90 ATMs.
Pointing to the grim reality, a National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) report says cyber crimes in India grew 20 per cent in 2015 over 2014.
