Vianet Communications has faced the largest user data breach in the history of Nepal exposing details of more than 170,000 users. News of the first surfaced April 8, when a twitter account calling itself ‘नरपिचास‘ (@paapi_kto_mah) tweeted that Vianet had been compromised. The breached data is stored on the dark web; he had mentioned the onion link which contained the user’s data.
The data contains personal details such as full names, addresses, mobile numbers and personal emails. Everybody on the internet is starting to worry about this data breach because it has become one of the most sensitive topics right now. However, Vianet hasn’t officially confirmed the data breach yet**. Although this data isn’t critical, cybercriminals in phishing attacks might target the affected people – pretending to be from the ISP with the aid of stolen information.
Data Breach in Nepal
After the recent Foodmandu breach, having these data leaks in a sequence is very troubling. It experienced a major data breach that was about 50K+ user data leaks. In early 2019 Vianet itself had faced such an issue. In Nepal, Data Security has been a major challenge in the recent few years. It’s irony Mero Surakshya, the company supposed to provide mobile protection plan, had left its user’s data over the internet freely. However, the website is not currently functioning. But you can see the cached version from Google by typing ‘merosurakshya Xls’ and first result leading to the website “https://www.merosurakshya.com/assets/excelsheet/Inactive-customer-1532586732.xlsx”.
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Vianet data breach was right after exactly a month from the Foodmandu data breach which faced it on March 8. The recent scenarios in Nepal go to show there is a critical need for periodic security auditing and regular patching and updating the system to keep the user’s data secure in any organization. The current state of cyber security in Nepal is worrisome.
If you are a Vianet user, we suggest that you find appropriate measures to protect yourself from further risk. Please consider
- changing your password on Vianet customer portal immediately
- changing any other accounts’ password if it’s the same email or phone number
- adding Multi–Factor Authentication where possible.
Have you say below in comments!!!
**[Update] Vianet has confirmed data breach and officially published a notice regarding the incident.
