The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), along with Bennet Coleman and Co Ltd (the parent company of Times of India) and Madhya Pradesh Police were allegedly victims of Chinese state-sponsored cyber attacks, said a report by US-based cybersecurity company Recorded Future. The hacker group temporarily named as TAG-28 by the cybersecurity firm allegedly targeted UIDAI due to its Aadhar database, which the firm defined as: "bulk personally identifiable information datasets (which) are valuable to state-sponsored threat actors". The company correlated TAG-28's targeting of Bennet Coleman with the group's long history of perpetrating intrusions against international media outlets. This report comes months after Recorded Future, in another report, said that a Chinese-state-sponsored hacker group People's Liberation Army's Unit 69010 had targeted Indian defence research organisations and others. Earlier, it was revealed that another Chinese hacker group Red Echo had hacked into India's power grid. This was confirmed by TS Transco who identified an external attempt to take control of its servers and foiled it by taking precautionary measures. If the claims made in the report are true, then it would be evidence of China's continued strategic and tactical interest in India-based organisations, both in the private and public sectors. While we have not yet received a response from the Times of India Group regarding the matter, UIDAI said that it had no "knowledge" of such a breach. The UIDAI database (Aadhaar Database) is encrypted and not accessible through public portal/ IPs. The public facing interface of UIDAI is the portal…
