Websites for the Tata conglomerate’s retail chain Croma and DTH television service Tata Sky had a vulnerability that exposed millions of customers’ contact information and addresses, the Economic Times first reported. Rahil Bhansali on Medium broke word of the exposure, sharing a credit with Ankit Pandey for finding the vulnerabilities (post on Croma, post on Tata Sky). Both the companies have reportedly patched the issues.
A vulnerability on Tata Sky’s website allowed Bhansali — or any coder with sufficient knowledge of Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs — to get name, phone number, address, service requests, and payment history, among other data points, for several of the DTH provider’s customers. “I went to the website and added my phone number to do a quick recharge. To my surprise, it showed me my name, subscriber id, balance and subscription end date without even any form of login,” Bhansali wrote.
Since Indian phone numbers are only ten digits long and are provisioned sequentially, Bhansali was able to test an extraction of several other users’ numbers. He wrote to Tata Sky CEO Harit Nagpal, after which the vulnerability was reportedly patched. At least 22 million customers’ records were impacted, Bhansali estimated, but he said the real number may be much higher as the datasets include past customers.
The retailer Croma, which mostly sells electronics through its physical stores, also leaked customers’ names and addresses upon being hit with phone numbers. The company sometimes creates accounts on its website for in-store customers as well, so this problem could impact anyone who provided their number and address while checking out on Croma. Bhansali said the company had “temporarily” fixed the issue.
We have reached out to Tata Sky and Croma for comment.
