India's largest bank suffers a data breach and customer data is on the dark web What's the story?

The State Bank of India  has acknowledged a cyber breach that resulted in the loss of data for a number of its employees, following an initial review that detected approximately 3,897 records of existing bank customers on the dark web.

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The bank's official confirmation came in a disclosure to the stock exchange on October 21, noting that investigators still needed to verify the accuracy, completeness, and sources of the data.

The disclosure or the bank’s statement did not address the mechanism by which it was exposed to the breach, as it only confirms the incident involving the loss of data without addressing the mechanism of the attack or even when it occurred, because the bank’s systems and services are operating normally and have continued normally without any tangible impact on core operations, financial performance or business continuity.

SBI explained that it received notifications on October 16 from several affiliated cybersecurity agencies, as well as the Cyber ​​Defense Agency and the Indian Emergency Response Team (CERT-N), and these notifications concerned the appearance of customer data on dark web networks.

The data records that surfaced on the dark web contain a range of confidential personal data for Bank of India customers, including phone numbers, dates of birth, names, gender, email addresses, customer file IDs, branch IDs, and even potential customer IDs, along with metadata linked to the bank's loan records.

The data that the bank disclosed was leaked did not include account numbers, balances, passwords, card details, or even government identification numbers, so the risk from this leak is limited to phishing attacks or impersonating the bank in an attempt to steal customer money.

Did the breach actually happen?

Several parties have confirmed the accuracy of some of the data actually presented in this leak, separately through the bank.The bank was able to verify the data of about 3,897 different customers, while the verified the data of only 4 customers, matching the customer's phone number with the picture that appears of him in the leaked records and his picture on the WhatsApp application.

The accuracy of the data suggests that the breach did indeed occur, although the bank did not indicate any measures taken with customers whose data was leaked or appeared in the recent leak.