Amazon’s 100 million customers’ data hacked

With about 450 million Internet users and intensive digital penetration in every sphere of life, India’s data generation rate is at its peak level. In this scenario, it has become very important that data generated is collected, organized, and processed with high confidentiality. In a new business model, data of individuals are being traded in billions of dollars to influence the idea of a person.

100 million customers’ data hacked

A recently released report related to Amazon’s data leak has revealed that a former female engineer of Amazon Web Services (AWS), the Cloud arm of commerce giant Amazon, had hacked more than 100 million data of the company. Paige Thompson, a 36-year-old female tech engineer had been found to be guilty by the US District Court in Seattle.

The report states that in an effort to trade data for money, she hacked about 100 million data from AWS’s critical data infrastructure and also hijacked computer servers to mine cryptocurrency.

Data – A New Product

Modern age development is driving the processing of data. Mass consumerism and digital penetration have provided some sort of data transaction between consumers and service providers. The transaction of data has become so strong that data itself has become a product and is being traded with the purpose of profit.

Easily available critical data of individuals can be dangerous for the safety and security of the nation’s integrity. Further, the highly incentivised data business has induced modern crimes like hacking and cyber extortion. Amazon’s 100 million data theft by hacking is the living proof of it.

Lesson for India

In the fast-developing digital world, India is not in a position to take a step back from globalization. So India needs to form a legal framework keeping the data of citizens secure & protected and lead the country in data-driven innovation and entrepreneurship.

So the key challenge for India would be to form a multi-layered data protection infrastructure to secure its safety. So the intended Data Protection Bill has to assimilate the principles of technologically flexible, holistic application, informed consent, controller accountability, and most importantly structured enforcement mechanism of data protection.

In the Puttaswamy versus Union of India case, the Supreme Court has already declared the right to privacy as a fundamental right inscribed under Article 21 of the Indian Constitution. The declaration puts the responsibility on the government to provide the required support in the protection of private data also.

So the government needs to provide sovereign data protection infrastructure to Indians. In this approach, consulting with every stakeholder like companies, individuals, and data security enforcement agencies, the government should build technologically advanced strong data protection defence architecture.

Learning from Amazon’s data leak, private companies operating in India need to establish their data centers in the country itself and they must be held legally responsible for any data breach or leak. Further, making strong data defense architecture, the sovereignty of the people on their data needs to be established by the sovereign country.