HIGH ALERT ZERO-DAY CVSS 7.8 3 days ago

Data Protection Board Imposes First Tier-1 Penalties Under DPDP Act 2023 for Unencrypted Sensitive Data Retention

By Ananya Deshmukh (Senior Privacy & DPDP Auditor, BlueCiphr)

          60-SECOND EXECUTIVE TL;DR
        

Enforcement body levies ₹45 Crore penalty against aggregators failing to demonstrate verifiable consent withdrawal.

First major financial penalty under the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act of 2023 and DPDP Rules 2025.
Audits revealed cleartext retention of Aadhaar numbers and biometric tokens past contract expiration.
Emphasizes immediate mandate for Data Principal Rights APIs and immutable access audit trails.

Immediate Mitigation: Deploy AES-256 GCM tokenization for PII and implement automated consent withdrawal webhooks.

The Data Protection Board of India has officially announced its initial landmark enforcement orders under the DPDP Act 2023. Multiple digital aggregators were penalized for storing unencrypted Sensitive Personal Data without explicit, granular consent records. ### Mandatory Compliance Controls Checklist 1. **Verifiable Consent Manager**: Deploy machine-readable consent withdrawal interfaces. 2. **Data Minimization**: Automatically purge expired personal data using cryptographic erasure. 3. **Data Principal Grievance Redressal**: Establish SLAs under 72 hours for data access inquiries.

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