Madras High Court dismisses petition seeking probe into Star Health Insurance data breach

The Madras High Court Wednesday dismissed the petition filed by cyber security researcher Himanshu Pathak seeking a probe into the alleged data breach at national insurance firm, Star Health Insurance..Justice M Dhandapani dismissed Pathak’s petition after noting that a civil suit filed by Star Health last year dealing with the same issue is already pending hearing before the Court and allowing Pathak’s petition would mean permitting “parallel proceedings” to go on in the matter.Justice Dhandapani noted that Star Health had filed the civil suit and also secured an interim injunction against Pathak restraining him from making any information retrieved from the insurance firm’s customer data base public.Such suit, the Court noted, had been filed by Star Health after Pathak, also a customer of the said insurance company, wrote to them in December 2022 highlighting that data preserved by Star Health was vulnerable, stored improperly, and that any hacker could steal such data. Star Health submitted that Pathak had told the insurance firm that he had hacked into their system and had access to such data and hence, it was forced to file the civil suit..Pathak argued that sensitive data of over two crore customers of Star Health had been stolen by Chinese hackers. This showed that Star Health did not store data in accordance with Union of India and Insurance Regulatory Development Authority’s guidelines and thus, a probe must be conducted into the matter.The Union government told the Court that the present dispute was merely a case of an “individual dispute” between Pathak and Star Health and that there was no scope for the Central government to conduct a probe into the alleged leak.The Court took note of all submissions and dismissed Pathak’s petition while granting him the liberty to approach the court again after the civil suit is decided.