PF-Aadhaar seeding portal hacked, EPFO refutes claim: All you need to know

Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) has apparently had to shut down the portal that it uses to for Aadhaar seeding with provident fund accounts of its subscribers following an alleged data breach where confidential user information was stolen by hackers.

The issue was purportedly raised by EPFO Central Provident Fund Commissioner V P Joy in a letter to Common Service Centre (CSC) Chief Executive Dinesh Tyagi on March 23.

“The web portal has been closed one-and-a-half months ago, immediately after a possible data theft was reported to us during a process of routine security check. There was some problem in the application run by CSC and it is not related to our data centre that maintains the EPF accounts,” Joy told Business Standard on Wednesday.

Speaking to PTI, Tyagi said that while the said application had been designed by the CSC, it was now hosted on EPFO data centres and servers. The EPFO shut down the website on March 22, urging the CSC to secure the confidential data of employees.

BJP calls Rahul tech illiterate; experts say NaMo app data leak dangerous

The Twitter war between the Congress and the BJP on the issue of data 'theft' escalated on Monday, with Congress President Rahul Gandhi dubbing Prime Minister Narendra Modi the "Big Boss who likes to spy on Indians" and the ruling party hitting back, saying even "Chhota Bheem" knows it is not snooping. Apart from the cartoon character, mythological characters from the epic 'Mahabharata' were also used by the two parties to take jibes at each other.

The BJP described Rahul Gandhi’s accusation of “data theft” against Prime Minister Narendra Modi as “a classic case of technological illiteracy” and said the Congress president was rattled after his plan to influence the next Lok Sabha election with the help of Cambridge Analytica was “exposed”. At a press conference, BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra lashed out at Gandhi, saying such a technological illiteracy had rarely been seen in Indian politics.Twitter was the battleground as the BJP also accused the Opposition Congress of data "theft", saying it had taken off its app after the allegations came out in the open. The Congress, however, claimed it had not done so. The site was "dysfunctional" and all memberships were done through the party's official website, it said