Personal data of 2.8 lakh WhiteHat Jr students reportedly exposed, company insists there was no breach

Indian education tech startup WhiteHat Jr was reportedly affected by a bug that left personal data of 2.8 lakh students exposed. WhiteHat Jr admitted there was a bug, but insisted that there was no data breach and that the issue was resolved within 24 hours of being found. The vulnerability was found on 19 November, and as per WhiteHat Jr, the issue was patched by 20 November. The company said in a statement:

WhiteHatJr takes security and privacy issues very seriously. We are committed to both our customers and to our compliance with applicable laws. Based on information received from responsible disclosures, we reviewed our setup and worked to patch specifically identified vulnerabilities within 24 hours.

[caption id=“attachment_9048591” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”]  WhiteHat Jr logo[/caption] Sonit Jain, CEO of GajShield Infotech, a network security company, said, “Human errors are very common and these errors lead to data breaches. With cloud being more convenient for enterprises to allow access to data for business operations, making this move without proper precautions can be disastrous for data security. This move must be backed by a strong data security approach with the ability to gain complete visibility on their entire threat surface, including internal threat vectors and the understating of how this data is being handled. This must also be followed by regular vulnerability check on their security infrastructure, especially for their cloud data.” WhiteHat Jr has recently been in after it **slapped defamation lawsuits** against its two biggest critics – Dr Aniruddha Malpani and Pradeep Poonia.