Indian startup Edureka suffered a serious data breach , which resulted in the names, addresses and phone numbers of more than 2 million users remaining exposed for over a week.
Cybersecurity experts working with SafetyDetectives first discovered the vulnerability on August 1 and, following their protocol, contacted Edureka on August 6 to inform her about the issue. However, when they did not receive a response, they contacted the Computer Emergency Response Team of India (CERT-In), which is India ’s cybersecurity authority .
The report by SafetyDetectives states that the vulnerability was found on a server of the company, which did not have proper security. The research team of SafetyDetectives, led by Anurag Sen, discovered 25 gigabytes of data, which contained more than 45 million compromised personal data files. Since some of the files were duplicates, the number of users affected by the data breach is estimated to be around 2 million, with most of them in India and countries like the US.
Edureka confirmed that it had been notified of the breach on its server, but denied that any personal information of its users was compromised.
Founded in 201, Edureka is an online learning platform that offers short-term courses as well as degree-level courses in partnership with educational institutions. The company's server is hosted by Amazon Web Services.
SafetyDetectives' report on the Edureka server breach states that such incidents can seriously impact affected users, as they allow malicious actors to launch more sophisticated attacks targeting specific individuals.
