Mumbai, April 7: boAt has reportedly been hit with a massive data breach, and the company lost data of 7.5 million customers. The Aman Gupta-founded boAt is a famous Indian electronics brand known for its headphones, speakers, True Wireless Buds (TWS), travel chargers, and many other consumer electronics items. According to a report, boAt customer data appeared on the dark web along with critical details such as contact name, address, contact number, and others. 

According to a report by Forbes India, boAt lost data on over 7.5 million customers, including PII (Personally Identifiable Information) such as name, house address, mobile number, email address, customer ID, and other critical information. The boAt massive data breach resulted in the loss of 2GB of data on the forum, said the report. The hacking took place on April 5, 2024. Elon Musk’s X Forced by Court To Block Some Popular Accounts in Brazil Without Disclosing Reason, Platform To Legally Challenge Court’s Decision.

As per Forbes India's report, a hacker known as "ShopifyGUY" claimed to have breached the data of boAt Lifestyle with 75,50,000 entries. The hacker then dumped files of data breaches with all the company's customers' PII information. The report highlighted that the impact of the action went beyond the immediate loss of personal information. It made the customers more vulnerable to identity theft, financial fraud and phishing scams. The boAt breached data could be used by the threat actors to use the customers' personal details and gain access to their bank accounts. 

It further said that hackers could use the data to conduct transactions from bank accounts and use credit cards for fraudulent purposes, said Saumay Srivastava, a Threat Intelligence Researcher who has knowledge about cybersecurity and does dark web investigations. He added that the hackers' actions could result in the company losing "customer confidence" and might face legal consequences leading to harm to the reputation. He said it would be essential to "implement adequate security measures." 

As per the report, ShopifyGUY is a new leaker; however, the data leaked was genuine. Rakesh Krishnan, senior threat analyst at NetEnrich, reportedly said that the hacker would gain a reputation among the forum community, which would result in an increase in their future data sales. He also said that ShopifyGUY might have gained access to boAt's customer data a month ago and posted it on the forum on April 5, 2024. OpenAI Transcribed Over Million Hours of YouTube Videos To Train Its AI Model GPT-4: Report.

Forbes India said that boAt should notify the users, conduct a comprehensive investigation on "how hackers gained access to the customer data", and revamp security measures. Yash Kadaki, founder of Security Brigade, reportedly said that instead of doing this, the company would move on. He also said that data is sold at eight credits on certain forums and costs two euros to buy the data. It might be freely available on Telegram. The data is said to be used by the scammers for scams related to emails and phone calls.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Apr 07, 2024 05:24 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).