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A startling privacy lapse at one of India’s oldest engineering institutes has put thousands of alumni and former students at risk. Personal records relating to more than 30,000 students and alumni — including mobile numbers, email addresses, photographs, caste category and financial background details — were found publicly accessible on a website that appears to have been running for years, the Times of India reported. The Times of India

According to the report, the searchable site let anyone pull up a record simply by entering a student’s enrolment number — a detail that, investigators say, strongly suggests the information was taken from IIT-Roorkee’s academic affairs records rather than voluntarily published material. When the newspaper alerted the institute, IIT-Roorkee ordered an internal inquiry and asked the deans of academic affairs and student welfare to investigate. The Times of India

Why this matters (and fast)
The presence of caste and financial background fields makes this more than a run-of-the-mill exposure of names and emails. In India, those attributes are deeply sensitive: they can be weaponised for targeted scams, discrimination, harassment or doxxing — and they materially increase the risk of identity fraud or social harm if combined with contact and photograph data. The DPDP Act — India’s national law governing digital personal data — requires data fiduciaries to adopt “reasonable security safeguards” to protect personal data in their control. meity.gov.in

Practical and regulatory pressure is mounting: under the Act data fiduciaries are expected to notify the Data Protection Board and affected individuals about personal-data breaches, and draft rules circulated earlier this year set out specific reporting formats and timelines. Even though some implementation details of the new regime are still being ironed out, the direction is clear — organisations that hold personal data are going to be held responsible for failing to secure it. DLA Piper Data Protection The Economic Times

How do exposures like this happen?
Security researchers and incident reports show the usual culprits: misconfigured cloud storage (public S3 buckets), unsecured search engines and databases (for example exposed Elasticsearch instances), or legacy web front-ends that pull data from internal systems without access controls. These configuration errors can leave entire archives searchable on the open web for months — sometimes years — before they are discovered. That pattern appears consistent with IIT-Roorkee’s case, where older records were reportedly still being updated on a public site. Qualys WIRED

The stakes for individuals
When phone numbers, email addresses and demographic details leak together, they fuel a host of secondary harms: credential stuffing, phishing and SIM-swap attacks aimed at financial accounts, targeted social-engineering scams, and even offline harassment. India has seen a sharp rise in phishing and financial fraud in recent years, which makes such exposures particularly hazardous for affected people. Business Standard Kaspersky

What IIT-Roorkee (and similar institutions) should do now

1. Containment: Take the site offline immediately and preserve logs for a forensic audit.
2. Forensics: appoint independent incident responders to confirm the scope — which records were exposed, when, and by what mechanism.
3. Notification: inform the Data Protection Board (as required) and communicate clearly to affected alumni/students about which fields were exposed and what the institute is doing to help.
4. Remediation: fix the underlying access control/configuration failures, rotate credentials and strengthen authentication on all internal systems and vendor integrations.
5. Longer term: publish a remediation timeline, offer targeted support (for example, guidance or monitoring services), and run a comprehensive security audit across the institute’s digital estate. These are standard steps recommended under India’s data-protection guidance and the draft rules prepared for breach reporting and remediation. DLA Piper Data Protection meity.gov.in

What affected alumni and students should do
Assume you may be impacted and act quickly: change passwords on accounts that reuse institutional credentials, enable multi-factor authentication, monitor bank and payment accounts, be extra cautious with unsolicited calls or messages, and consider a fraud/freeze alert with your bank or credit provider if available. If you spot suspicious financial activity, report it immediately to your bank and local police (file an FIR if needed). Official guidance from cybersecurity authorities and consumer-protection bodies recommends these exact steps after a breach. Kaspersky AP News

Bigger picture: even top institutions are vulnerable
IIT-Roorkee’s standing and long history (founded in 1847) make this episode a sharp reminder: prestige does not equal invulnerability. Universities and colleges hold some of the most sensitive personal and demographic data of their communities, yet many run legacy systems or third-party integrations that were not built with modern access controls. The incident should be a wake-up call for higher-education institutions nationwide to prioritise data-security governance and transparency. The Times of India Up Guard

For now, the questions are straightforward: how quickly will IIT-Roorkee identify the root cause, how many records were truly exposed, and what protections will the institute offer affected people? Until those answers — and an independent audit — are public, alumni and students should assume the worst and take basic safeguards immediately.

IIT Roorkee Data Breach: Personal details of 30,000 students, alumni exposed online for years; caste, finances, contact details at risk | Dehradun News - Times of India

A significant data privacy lapse at IIT-Roorkee has exposed the personal information of over 30,000 students and alumni on a public website for years.

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