KATHMANDU, April 9 | In yet another breach of customer data, Vianet Communications – one of the largest internet service providers in Nepal – suffered a ‘serious hack’ on Wednesday. Data belonging to more than 160,000 consumers was leaked by a hacker through Twitter.
This is the second such data breach incident in a month. Data of Foodmandu – a popular e-commerce food delivery service – was breached by hackers exactly a month ago.
On Wednesday, data was leaked by a twitter handle @paapi_kto_mah attaching a link, where the personal data of more than 160,000 Vianet users was made public. The data included emails, phone numbers and addresses.
“The data of more than 160,000 users has been compromised. We [Vianet] found out about the situation today [Wednesday] afternoon,” Binay Bohra, managing director of Vianet Communications, told Republica, adding that the company has already informed the Cyber Bureau of Nepal Police.
The company also informed that hackers had started to dig the consumer data from Tuesday.
“The incident is similar to the hacking of a food delivery company a month ago. It is not clear the Vianet data was compromised by the same group,” said Bohra, adding that Vianet is also investigating the incident.
Bohra confirmed that personal information of consumers including phone numbers, addresses and email addresses were made public by the hackers. “The link shared by the hackers has already been taken down with the help of Nepal Telecommunications Authority (NTA),” Bohra added.
Meanwhile, the company has accepted that it needs to make the system more powerful to better secure users’ information.
A month ago, a Twitter user going by the username Mr Mugger had leaked personal information of almost 50,000 users of Foodmandu.
Meanwhile, the Cyber Bureau of Nepal Police informed that the company informed about the incident late in the afternoon after several online portals broke the news. The cyber bureau said police have already started investigations into the case.
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