[BreachExchange] Pine Labs Faces Alleged Data Breach; 50,000 Unique Records Exposed

[Sophia Kingsbury]

https://inc42.com/buzz/pine-labs-faces-alleged-data-breach-50000-unique-records-exposed/

Noida-based fintech unicorn Pine Labs seems to be the latest victim of data
breach in the Indian startup ecosystem. The IPO-bound merchant commerce
platform has allegedly witnessed breach of more than 50,000 unique records
that includes sensitive information such as contact details, name, email.

The hack by BlackMatter ransomware has allegedly exposed Pine Labs’ service
and other private agreements between multiple Indian banks/institutions and
Pine Labs, multiple financial reports, among others. The total data size
hacked amounted to 100 Gb.

The hack was first reported by Cyble,  a global threat intelligence SaaS
provider on August 11, 2021. However, Pine Labs has denied any such data
breach. In a response to Inc42, Sanjeev Kumar, chief technology officer of
Pine Labs said, “Pine Labs continues to be one of the most secure and
compliant PCI-DSS platforms. We can confidently state that our systems
continue to be fully secure and our production systems continue to operate
as usual and all customer data is safe.”

Kumar however underlined that the data mentioned are some 2014 legal
business contracts and the Pine Labs is investigating to see if any user
laptop or server was the source of this information.

“Based on further analysis, we found that the data shared by the ransomware
group contains their internal documents such as agreements with multiple
institutions and other confidential information,” Cyble said on its
website. In screenshots shared by Cyble on its website, data compromised
included names, designation, department, email address obtained from
internal documents of Pine Labs.

Founded by Lokvir Kapoor, Pine Labs provides products and solutions for
merchants, enabling them to accept offline and online retail payments. It
claims that its cloud-based platform helps over 3.5 lakh point of sale
terminals across 3,700 cities and towns in India and Malaysia.

Hackers hacking into companies and exposing sensitive information on the
dark web in exchange for some ransom is a common practice. However, since
the onset of the pandemic, the frequency of data breaches has increased at
a significant rate, as more people continued to shift online. Earlier
reports of IPO-bound Mobikwik surfaced that stated a potential data breach
of over 100 Mn Indian MobiKwik users’. Independent cybersecurity researcher
Rajshekhar Rajaharia earlier had reported records for 11 Cr MobiKwik users
with 8.2 Tb of data were breached. Major pizza chain Domino’s India
reported to have witnessed a data breach exposing information of over 18 Cr
orders. The sensitive information appeared on the dark web and the database
was made public by the hacker or hacking group behind the leak. Indian
sweets and snacks brand Haldiram’s faced a ransomware attack by
unidentified hackers who demanded a ransom of $7, 50,000.

In 2020, Indian organisations paid somewhere between $1 Mn — $2.5 Mn to
hackers to get back data from after cyberattacks. The report by US cyber
tech firm CrowdStrike further revealed that 74% of Indian companies
suffered a ransomware attack.
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