All of us know the importance of privacy. Privacy is one of the corner stones of trust and security in any business, online or not. We all try to ask for privacy in the services we use in day to day life and every company worth their salt try to impress customers with their privacy statements. However it looks like neither the the authorities of a state nor a very prominent bank in India does know even the basics of privacy and security.
What you are looking at is the complete details of the voters list in the state of Andhra Pradesh. Complete details means every single thing the state knows about you.
Anyway I will tell where I got this data from. I did not hack into the secure servers of AP. I did not crack the pass-phrase of the DBA. Apparently the authorities sold their waste papers to a vendor. Incidentally this vendor made paper plates using these and sold it a local cafe. I got the paper plates whenever I ordered something from there.
I took some more samples from there. Then came another shocking truth. Among the data there was data corresponding to the details of the customers of a famous bank. Looking at the samples it was obvious that the papers contained data of all the customers of the bank from all parts of India.
I don’t know how to react to this. Just wanted to let you know that the next time you are doing business with anyone, ask them what they do with their waste papers.
Nice post. Often, people build highly secure software/hardware systems, but fail to take physical security into account.
Krishna,
Security is all about people.
Really a shocking post!!
But I have a doubt..actually wat shld they do with waste papers??
Asha,
They should use paper shredders to cut the waste papers to very small pieces which will help minimize the risk.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_shredder
Fricking lord. That is awful! In india paper shredders are hardly used and we usually burn up all the important waste.
The same thing goes to all your credit card bills and phone bills and stuff. Either you have them safe or burn them to ashed…but nevr sell them to the paper wala.
Anand,
Right.
[...] blogger claims that the complete details of the voters list in the state of Andhra Pradesh was breached because the state sold their waste papers to a vendor who made paper plates using the [...]