Description

On August 13, 2022 threat analysts from CloudSEK's threat intelligence team XVigil identified that BharatPay's backend database, which contains customers' personal information, bank accounts, and transactions between February 2018 to August 2022, had been leaked in an underground hacking forum. Across India, BharatPay provides various services like fund transfers, cash deposits, and digital financial services to customers, as well as merchants by partnering with numerous distribution networks, also in 11 states, BharatPay operates with over 50,000 retail outlets and the company has also been offering prepaid cards to its customers through its partner network. As per reports, BharatPay's compromised database contains user names, mobile phone numbers, hashed passwords, and in some cases, email addresses and UPI IDs, along with several Indian insurance and banking firms' official email addresses. Researchers also discovered that, in addition to Personal Identifiable Information of users and sensitive financial information, transaction data and API keys of online bill payment facilitators such as Pathway Recharge and Mr. Robotics were also leaked, as well as callback response logs containing information such as the transacting entity's phone number, transaction ID, and the bank balance amount were leaked. Further, SMS vendors' information was also exposed in the data breach. In addition, researchers found that they can able to obtain the SQL dump from the threat actor via their sources, that include the contact details of 32 partner banks, including the Reserve Bank of India, the HDFC Bank, the State Bank of India, Axis Bank, Yes Bank, Syndicate Bank, and Punjab National Bank. The threat actor was also observed to have accessed the API configurations database, from which they were able to manipulate BharatPay's commissions and discounts. Researchers reported that, the data breach in BharatPay was caused due to an outdated software version 4.9.7 of PHP, which rolled out in October 2020, as well as the use of outdated jQuery modules that contain prototype pollution and other issues. The NIST vulnerability database reports that prototype pollution allows hackers to alter object attributes by injecting properties into existing JavaScript language construct prototypes. Using this technique, hackers can propagate a Denial of Service (DoS) attack or remote code execution.