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New Delhi: As cybersecurity continues to remain a key point to look into in the digitalised era, Boat from India has reportedly faced a major breach that affects more than 7 million customers of the audio company. Boat is one of the top selling brands in the affordable audio segment, which has catapulted the brand to the top of the global charts in the last few years.
However, most of its customers will not be pleased to hear the development, which might have exposed their personal details, now available on the dark web to the person who is happy to pay the price for the trove of data. The report from Forbes India says details like their names, email addresses, phone numbers, and even their residential address have been exposed. It also mentions the data breach happened on April 5, 2024, by a hacker named ‘ShopifyGUY’ who claims to have dumped more than 2GB of Boat customer data and made it available on the dark web.
As you might be aware, if a hacker gets hold of the database, they can use your phone number and email ID to not only bypass the device security and also send phishing mails that can be used to steal data or even money by infecting your devices with malware.
They might get calls from these scammers with all their information and even try to make them click on website links to download apps, or any other form. With AI becoming a serious weapon for these hackers, we cannot discount the use of the tech to disrupt the customers and coerce them into sharing more details which they should completely avoid.
The homegrown consumer electronics company has filed its IPO documents in 2021 but postponed the offering owing to market fluctuations. It’s worth mentioning that boAt faces competition from brands such as Fire-Boltt, Noise, Xiaomi, and Samsung. The worrying aspect of the data breach is that the hacker is ready to sell it for as low as EUR 2 (Rs 180 approx) which means scammers will be rubbing their hands in glee to get the data and start their actions against millions of the customers mentioned on the list.
