Personal details of individuals can be used by hackers in a whole lot of possibly malicious ways. This is why when Russian hackers recently stole details of 45 million Turkish citizens, it sent the alarm bells ringing among security researchers.
Apparently, the immense amount of data was stolen from the voter data system of a political party. The system was unguarded and highly insecure, which is why Russian hackers were able to gain access to it without any issues and spent two hours downloading the entire data without being detected.
The data that was stolen included the names, ID numbers and addresses of some 54 million Turkish citizens. This data can be put to use by the hackers in many different ways such as creating fake identities.
The problem brings attention to a critical problem: that political parties routinely rely on modern digital tools to gather data and then store it. However, not many of them are particularly bothered about digital security and the data systems of most political parties are usually insecure, being an open invitation to data theives.
The recent breach was discovered by researchers from KONDA security firm, although it remains to be seen how the said political party or the Turkish government responds to the whole episode. To avoid the misue of the data, Turkish government will need to take certain precautionary measures which may even involve informing such citizens whose information has been compromised.
Source: Hurriyet News
Courtesy: The Hacker News
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