Chennai: Less than a week after DC reported the alleged data breach in which details of students who appeared for class-10 and plus-2 exams in March 2018 were put up for sale to educational institutions, the Cyber Crime wing of Greater Chennai Police arrested three persons. The persons arrested on Saturday were identified as P. Praveen Chowdry (39) of Sampoornam Avenue in Vadapalani, A. Sudhakar (32) of Arcot road in Vadapalani and Venkata Rao (50) of T. Nagar.
The incident, which had shaken the education fraternity and students who had appeared for their Boards, came to light on July 24 after parents and students received an unusually high number of calls from private engineering colleges and coaching centres.
The institutions were trying to lure them with various offers and gifts leaving many parents to wonder how they get access to their personal details such as phone numbers and plus 2 marks. The director of government examinations (DGE), Vasundhara Devi, immediately approached city police commissioner A.K. Viswanathan and lodged a complaint against the data breach.
“The details of students were sold by schools to private websites. The details of the students were used for commercial purpose degrading the state government and the department,” the complaint said.
The cyber crime police registered a case under various sections and investigated. “Preliminary investigation suggested that Praveen Chowdry, the proprietor of Nari Technologies Pvt Ltd had obtained the details and sold them on websites for money,” the cyber crime police said.
It is learnt that Sudhakar, who is running a website designing firm, allegedly helped Praveen Chowdry in creating and designing more than 10 websites and uploading the details to the Internet.“Venkata Rao of K Square India Technologies Pvt Ltd bought the details and used them for commercial purposes,” the police said.
All the three persons were sent to judicial remand. Sources said an investigation has been initiated to find the possible connivance of department employees in the data breach issue. “More details will be revealed after interrogating the arrested persons,” a police official said.
Details including students name, address, date of birth, community name and phone number were stolen from the database. The accused had floated the details of the students in websites for sales to the institutions at a cost of Rs 2,000 to Rs 5,000.
