It is a free for all on Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation’s portal when it comes to data about births or deaths. Thanks to its sloppy security, confidential records of several thousands, alive and dead, stand exposed on the municipal body’s website.
At a click of the mouse, birth and death enquiry links can reveal the status of all applications with residential address, place of birth or death and name. Details of over 250 application requests are now available across all the 18 circles of GHMC! If one chooses to search, it is possible to obtain details of all births or deaths for any time duration.
The search can be performed by just entering a search period, gender and a circle.
For instance, searching in Secunderabad (circle 18) for births from December 1 through December 29, 2015 reveals birth of 16 boys and 11 girls, with names of father, mother, place of birth, date of birth and in some cases, the child’s name too. Through the search, it can be seen that the GHMC’s digital database extends back to 1930s. GHMC is not the only municipality with a website that leaks data. Chennai Municipal Corporation recently made headlines for letting anybody search and download birth certificates. Given that 50 gigabytes of data including data on taxes, births, deaths and planning sits on GHMC’s servers, data security experts expressed shock over the leak.
‘Impersonation can be done easily’
“Absence of a security database is serious. Using data of birth and death, it is possible to impersonate another person or at least gain a foothold to start doing it,” said Shantiswaroop, of Uurmi Systems, who works in the field of cyber security, even as he called for rigorous data security measures when dealing with public information.
Gross negligence
Hyderabad-based cyber security consultant Vikas Jain, who looked at the website, blamed gross negligence and disregard for security for the flaws. “By simply limiting queries, it is possible to safeguard the database. It is a fix that is not difficult to implement,” he said.
GHMC’s Additional Commissioner, IT, K. Surendra Mohan could not be contacted for comments, despite repeated efforts.
