New Delhi, May 2: Following reports of data theft of employees enrolled under the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO), the retirement body has temporarily shut Aadhaar seeding portal aadhaar.epfoservices.com.  The EPFO has urged the CSC to secure the confidential data of employees and plug in the vulnerabilities.

In a letter dated March 23, it was stated, “The IB has advised adhering best practices and guidelines for securing the confidential data, re-emphasising regular and meaningful audit and vulnerability assessment and penetration testing (CAPT) of the entire system from competent auditors and testers”.

EPFO said that the central intelligence bureau had intimated of “hackers exploiting the vulnerabilities prevailing on the website aadhaar.epfoservices.com of EPFO."

EPFO temporarily shuts Aadhaar seeding portal

According to a report by the Business Standard, the possible data leak from the website includes employees' Aadhaar number, name, date of birth, father’s name, PAN, employment details, among others. However, the EPFO said it is still unaware of the nature of the data theft.

EPFO denied any Aadhaar data leak. Here is the clarification of the same:

EPFO’s Aadhaar seeding portal that has been hacked, provides facility to EPFO field offices and CSC centres to seed Aadhaar through e-know your customer (KYC) mode with the universal account number (UAN) allocated to employees.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on May 02, 2018 02:25 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).