UIDAI warns people not to share Aadhaar number after TRAI's chief's dare

In a statement, UIDAI said: "Such activities are uncalled for and should be refrained as these are not in accordance with the law."

The statement has been quoted by The Times Of India.

Amid reports of Aadhaar data breach, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) Chairman R S Sharma dared hackers to show what harm they could do to him by sharing his Aadhaar number publicly via Twitter.

What followed was that a bunch of "ethical" hackers were able to extract Sharma's mobile numbers, residential address, date of birth and PAN number from the Aadhaar number.

Not limiting to this his voter ID number, telecom operator, phone model were made public on Twitter.

Even one hacker deposited Re.1 to his bank account via electronic transfer asking him to improve the system for better security.

Anivar Aravind on Sunday tweeted: "My donation to @rssharma3 's aadhaar via BHIM to build Govt systems with better engineering to protect user privacy.
You can also join in this #DonateToRSS / #GiveToRamSewak drive."

In a his response to the hackers, R S Sharma wrote in an article in The Indian Express that, "One interesting hack was to deposit one rupee in my account through the marvel of a system called UPI, which has been built by our country to enable financial inclusion on the scale we need. The world is in awe of this technology. But if you define crediting a rupee to an account as hacking, well more people might be happy to be hacked. In the last two days, there have been hundreds of attempts at false authentication from UIDAI servers and not even a single one of them has succeeded."

Sharma claimed that he has not lost the challenege by making public his Aadhaar number.

"Thus far I have not lost the challenge and I’m very confident that I will not. Yes, some distress may be caused to me by the concerted effort of so many people. However, for that Aadhaaris not to blame," he wrote.

"The truth is that people are proving their identity today through the Aadhaar online platform. This is empowering millions of people who get subsidies into their account or obtain other benefits. (People are also providing a copy of their Aadhaar cards to various service providers, though this is neither required nor desirable.)," Sharma wrote in the article

Sharma, who is a former UIDAI (Unique Identification Authority of India) director general, is one of the ardent supporters of Aadhaar.

Eeven as hackers have been able to delve into several personal details of Sharma, he claims that those have been found through Google search.

He claimed that all these efforts on the part of the hackers were "waste of time."

"You have found information about me that other users could have obtained by a determined Google search without the benefit of knowing the Aadhaar number. Having failed to penetrate the UIDAI’s system, you have tried to hack my email accounts (unsuccessfully) and to subscribe me to a large number of services. Many of these services take reasonable precautions and have sent me innumerable OTPs in their attempt to authenticate my ID. That’s been a waste on their part and a waste of my time. Your time is wasted too, but apparently you don’t care," Sharma wrote.