Bank of Baroda confirms data breach amid cyber concerns

On Monday, July 27, Bank of Baroda (BoB), a leading state-owned brand, confirmed a security incident that led to unauthorised access to “certain data” by threat actors. BoB also confirmed that the incident involved compromise of an employee’s email account.

BoB’s statement

In a post on X, BoB said, “The matter was promptly identified, and immediate containment measures were implemented.” The bank did not elaborate on the scale of the data breach and what type of data was accessed by the threat actor, it said that core banking systems were not breached in the incident and continue to remain secure.

In the post, BoB further clarified that it is carrying out a forensic probe of the incident and is working closely with relevant authorities in accordance with regulatory requirements.

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Social media posts also alleged that nearly 1 terabyte (TB) of data, including BoB’s personal and corporate banking records, were stolen by a threat actor. However, the information has not been verified independently.

Srikanth L speaks up

Cybersecurity researcher Srikanth L, who also runs a consumer awareness initiative called Cashless Consumer, said that the leaked data includes customer details, loan papers, internal audit records and identification documents. Cited by Reuters, Srikanth also said that the data appeared on a dark web site on Saturday night, July 25, and was advertised as a cache containing more than 700 gigabytes (GB) of information.