Data Breach

Indian foreign ministry’s Global Pravasi Rishta portal leaks expat passport details

The Cybernews research team reported that India’s government platform Global Pravasi Rishta Portal was leaking sensitive user data.

Original post @ https://cybernews.com/security/indias-foreign-ministry-leaks-passport-details/

The Global Pravasi Rishta Portal, India’s government platform for connecting with its overseas population, leaked sensitive data, including names and passport details.

The Cybernews research team has been alerted that the Global Pravasi Rishta Portal was leaking sensitive user data. Unfortunately, the tip proved accurate.

The platform exposed user names, surnames, country of residence, and email addresses in plaintext, as well as occupation status, phone and passport numbers. The leak was possible because of poor security measures, such as a lack of authentication methods.

The Global Pravasi Rishta Portal is a platform with the goal of connecting 30 million Indian expats. The platform owner is the Ministry of External Affairs of India, the country’s government body responsible for implementing foreign policy.

The portal is meant as a tool for communication between the Ministry of External Affairs, Indian Missions, and the Indian diaspora. Pravasi Rishta means “expatriate relationships” in English.

The Cybernews team has reached out to the Ministry of External Affairs to inform it of the leak. We did not receive a reply, but several days later the security issue had been fixed.

The data was exposed via the website’s edit function, where manipulating the URL allowed anyone to access the edit details of any user on the site. In other words, it takes only one registered user to access all of them, since changing the user ID in the URL leads to another user’s account.

If you want to know which is the risk for the exposure of passport numbers read the original post published by CyberNews @https://cybernews.com/security/indias-foreign-ministry-leaks-passport-details/.

About the author: Vilius Petkauskas, Senior Journalist ay CyberNews 

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Global Pravasi Rishta)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.

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