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Hawk Eye App Data Breach: Telangana Police Under Fire

Hawk Eye App Data Breach Telangana Police Under Fire.

Hyderabad: In a shocking revelation, the personal data of around 2 lakh users of Hawk Eye, the Telangana Police ‘citizen friendly’ app data has been reportedly breached by scamsters and the data was posted on the Breach Forums on May 29, 2024 by an anonymous user.

It should be noted that lakhs of citizens use this application on a daily basis to register their complaints about traffic violations, criminal violations, about crime against women and several other purposes including the presence of a SOS button during emergencies. While registering themselves, users also give their personal data such as mobile number, email IDs, location permission among clothes. Many of the Telangana top cops emphasised on usage of hawkeye app in case of any emergency.

Now, such an application stands compromised. According to the reports, the data breach was also posted on a Breach Forum, a data leak site, banned by FIB.

Hawk Eye App Data Breach Telangana Police Under Fire

In a screenshot from the Breach Forum, an admin of with an username, ‘Adm1nFr1end’ is publicly mentioned that “Hello Breach Forums Community, Today I have uploaded the HAWKEYE SURVEILLANCE HYD INDIA Database for you. What’s Hawk-Eye Surveillance? several categories in which police track Down. They include emergency contacts, vehicle and mobile search. Access to all Contact Numbers of State Police at one place. Data Contains: Anonymous Users Info, Email addresses, Names, Phone numbers,
Physical addresses, Location Cords, phone IMEl, Alerts Cords, Extra blah blah”

“Tiny tip of the problem”

Netizens and cyber activists are frowning over this alleged breach of data through HawkEye and criticising the Telangana police department for its weak security practices.

Hyderabad based Cyber activist Srinivas Kodali, took to X and posted, “I kept warning the Telangana Police building 80 ft walls will not stop people from accessing their data. Dear @TelanganaDGP @TelanganaCOPs you have one of the worst app developers and security practices. You don’t even have a responsible vulnerability disclosure program for people to disclose cybersecurity issues in your setup. Get an audit done of your apps or they will leak more. It is very easy to hack the @TelanganaCOPs when they used basic authentication with base64 encoding with a hard-coded password. This is just a tiny tip of their problems, when they don’t engage with critics and keep saying we know what we are doing”.