Indian FinTech company PolicyBazaar and its parent company PB Fintech on Sunday released a notification stating that the IT systems of the company underwent a security breach on 19th July 2022.
PolicyBazaar which was established in June 2008, is a wholly owned subsidiary of PB Fintech Ltd. It is in the business of providing a platform to customers where they can compare insurance policies and similar financial products of various insurance companies in India. PolicyBazaar is also one of the largest insurance aggregators in the entire country.
Furthermore, the notification stated that some vulnerabilities were found in the cyber systems and those were exploited to get access to the system illegally. It said that all the government and regulatory authorities had been informed regarding the security breach and an audit has been initiated to root out any vulnerabilities which are still existing in the systems.
The company also clarified in its notification that no serious breach or leakage of customer data has happened and that it would do all in this capacity to ensure no similar events occur in the future.
Having sold more than 19 million insurance policies since its inception in 2008, PolicyBazaar has nearly 93.4% of the market share in the digital insurance marketplace. This huge magnitude of insurance policies makes companies such as PolicyBazaar an obvious target of cyberattacks due to the immense amount of data being stored in each policy.
Cyberattacks against Indian entities
This is not the first time a major company in India has become a target of organized cybercrime.
A few days ago, the renowned travel planning and booking app Clear Trip was attacked by unknown individuals. In an email sent to its customers, the company said that its internal systems were breached and only sensitive information of one individual profile got leaked.
In a similar incident, hackers and certain deceitful customers of Razorpay took advantage of loopholes in its payment systems to steal nearly 7.3 crore rupees. According to a complaint filed by the Fintech payment service provider, the fraudsters authenticated nearly 830 failed transactions to defraud the company.
With annual revenue of more than 145.2 million dollars handling financial data of more than 50 lakh merchants across various countries, Razor Pay is a very attractive target for hackers and cyberterrorists.
According to American cybersecurity company Akamai Technologies, Inc., India is the 5th most attacked country in the world. The majority of the entities which are attacked in India are businesses that are into financial services, e-commerce and digital media.