SBI leaked financial data of millions of customers, US technology news website reports

New Delhi, Jan 31: India's largest bank State Bank of India (SBI) has found itself in trouble after it was found that it has compromised with financial data of its millions of customers.

As per a report in US-based technology industry news website TechCrunch published on Wednesday, January 30, the bank came up with an unprotected server that allowed anybody to access the customers' information, like bank balances and recent transactions.

"The server, hosted in a regional Mumbai-based data center, stored two months of data from SBI Quick, a text message and call-based system used to request basic information about their bank accounts by customers of the government-owned State Bank of India (SBI), the largest bank in the country and a highly ranked company in the Fortune 500," the report said.

It was reported that the bank had not protected the server with a password, allowing anybody to sneak in. It was also not known for how long the server remained exposed till it was found in such a state by a security researcher who informed TechCrunch about the leak on the condition of anonymity.

TechCrunch also approached security researcher Karan Saini who found his phone number in the database. He told TechCrunch that the data available can be used to target individuals who are known to have high account balances.

Saini had earlier found a data breach in Aadhaar, the country's national identity database.