Employees’ Provident Fund of India, the retirement fund body, had to shut down its website on March 22, after a possible data breach in Aadhaar seeding with EPF accounts. There were concerns about leakage of subscribers’ data from ‘aadhaar.epfoservices.com’, a website operated by Common Service Centre (CSC) that comes under the Ministry of Electronics and IT. Also Read - Great Relief For 6 Crore PF Subscribers as EPFO to Credit Part of 8.5% Interest on Employees Provident Fund For FY20

EPFO said that it has discontinued services provided through Common Service Centre “pending vulnerability checks” and ruled out any leakage of subscribers’ data from a government website. EPFO, clarified in a statement that “Warnings regarding vulnerabilities in data or software is a routine administrative process based on which the services which were rendered through CSC have been discontinued from March 22, 2018.” Also Read - EPFO Launches Multi-location Claim Settlement Facility | Here's All You Need to Know

“No confirmed data leakage has been established or observed so far. As part of the data security and protection, EPFO has taken advance action by closing the server and host service through CSC pending vulnerability checks,” EPFO said. Also Read - 7th Pay Commission Latest News: Govt Releases Rs 868 Crore Pension Along With Rs 105 Crore Arrear

For smooth and convenient withdrawal and transfer of money, EPFO requires you to link Aadhaar with universal account number. Universal account number was started last year to solve the problem of multiple provident funds number. Now when the employee transfers job her or his provident fund number does not get changed. It remains the same and the fund gets transferred automatically in the new company.

The report of the data breach has come when the Supreme Court of India is hearing a case on the validity of linking Aadhaar with financial services. There have been concerns about privacy and chances of Aadhaar being used as a means of surveillance by the government.

With inputs from PTI