In a serious security breach of Karnataka’s famed land record database, 19 acres of government wasteland in Devanahalli were shifted to a private individual illegally last week.In Gobbaragunte village of Devanahalli taluk, around 40 km from Bengaluru, land value is very high. The incident has caused ripples in the revenue department. Land sharks are believed to be behind the manipulation of records.This is the third time that the Bhoomi software has been breached. Bhoomi, introduced to digitise land records , came into being in 2002.The first breach was reported in Mangaluru a decade ago when Bhoomi software was still in its nascent stage. A failed attempt was made by certain individuals to change the mutation of a government property to a private person.Two years ago, the department discovered another case where an attempt was made to change the RTC (Record of Rights, Tenancy and Crop Information) of a nine-acre government plot in Malur taluk of Kolar district to a private individual. The department had then filed a police complaint but the investigation did not progress.“The modus operandi of Malur and and Devanahalli cases are similar. In both cases, the culprit has changed the RTC of government land to a private person by manipulating the database. This has been done bypassing the mutation process,” said a source at the Bhoomi Monitoring Cell. It is learnt that an insider could be involved in the cases to help the land mafia grab unused government land.In both cases, department staff were able to identify the changes because any modification made in the database gets recorded immediately.“We soon checked the history of land records and found out that the change was done manually,” the source said. In the Devanahalli case, the owner of government land was mentioned as Huchappa bin Nanjappa, someone non-existent.Of late, security of land records has come into question. Revenue department officials, however, believe there is no cause for worry. “The Bhoomi software cannot be hacked at all. In both cases, some person has breached the security and logged into the system to change the database,” Munish Moudgil, Commissioner of Survey Settlement and Land Records, told ET.To find out if similar cases of manipulation have happened in the past, the Revenue Department has now decided to check all data stored in Bhoomi software. “The process is yet to start. It will be completed in two months,” Moudgil said.Despite the department vouching for the safety of Bhoomi software, the Bhoomi Monitoring Cell has decided to take some extra measures. “As a first step, we are encrypting the whole of Bhoomi data. This will prevent even officials from seeing the database. Second, we will be shifting all the data to the centralised database,” Moudgil said.