WhiteHat Jr data not compromised, says Indian AI vendor

In a statement to IANS, Surga Thilakan, Co-Founder and CEO at Salesken, stressed that the company resolved the issue within an hour and their assessment suggests that 'no data was downloaded or compromised'

A data breach into live online coding provider WhiteHat Jr. via India-based AI conversational intelligence platform Salesken.ai, which is one of WhiteHat Jr's vendors for India operations, may have exposed data of students, parents and teachers on the popular coding platform. Salesken.ai on Thursday admitted the breach but said that no data was compromised.

In a statement to IANS, Surga Thilakan, Co-Founder and CEO at Salesken, stressed that the company resolved the issue within an hour and their assessment suggests that "no data was downloaded or compromised". TechCrunch first reported that an unsecured server belonging to Salesken.ai contained the names and classes taken by students and email addresses and phone numbers of parents and teachers.

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"The server also contained other data related to students, such as chat logs between parents -- identified by their phone number -- and WhiteHat Jr staff, as well as comments recorded by teachers about their students," the report mentioned. The unsecured server also housed record of emails containing sensitive codes that could allow hackers to reset user accounts as well as other internal Salesken.ai data.

Thilakan said that the cloud device was a non-production, staging instance of one integration service for one customer. "The breach affected a very small subset of customer data of 21,005 unique records which is less than 1% of India based end-of-life integration logs and did not contain any financial information," she elaborated. According to a WhiteHat Jr spokesperson, Salesken.ai, one of WhiteHat Jr's vendors for India operations, has experienced a potential security incident.

"We are currently communicating with Salesken.ai about the incident and will take appropriate action in accordance with our rigorous security policies," the spokesperson told IANS. WhiteHat Jr., acquired last year by leading ed-tech firm BYJU'S for $300 million (roughly Rs 2,246 crore), introduced the live 1:1 coding category in India and in just two years, thousands of students from more than 100 countries in the world have signed up for its coding classes.

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