// Security NEWS // A Russian Leak Makes Public The Data of 2.25 Million Individuals
Russian government sites have disclosed the personal and passport information of more than 2.25 million citizens, including government employees and high-ranking politicians.
Source
Error of manipulation or missed act, the question arises. Many Russian government sites have disclosed the personal and passport information of more than 2.25 million citizens, government employees and high-ranking politicians.
The discovery of this leak must be attributed to Ivan Begtin, the co-founder of the Russian NGO Informational Culture. In a three-part blog post, he said he had investigated government online certification centres, 50 government portals and a tendering platform used by government agencies.
The result of this investigation was the discovery of 23 Russian government sites where the Individual Insurance Account Number (IIAN), the Russian equivalent of a social security number, was visible and 14 sites where passport information was leaking.
In total, data from more than 2.25 million Russian citizens were available online, available to anyone who wanted to download them, said Ivan Begtin. Other data were also disclosed by these sites, including full names, job title and location, emails and tax identification numbers.
Although some leaks were more difficult to identify, and Ivan Begtin had to extract metadata from digital signature files, some data could be found using a simple Google search in open government web directories.
The Russian government informed for eight months
In a message posted yesterday on Facebook, the co-founder of Informational Culture said he contacted Roskomnadzor, the Russian government agency responsible for personal data protection, eight months ago.
The latter also explained that he had informed the Russian Authority on several occasions, but that the agency had not intervened to secure the government sites that caused the leaks.
After trying to raise awareness of the issue by publishing three blog posts at the end of April, Begtin yesterday shared his findings with the Russian news website RBC, which published an in-depth article.
The newspaper's investigation uncovered the passports and personal details of several senior Russian government officials, such as Deputy Speaker of the Russian Duma (Parliament) Alexander Zhukov, former Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich and former Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly Chubais.
On the same day, the Roskomnadzor published a statement reiterating its stance that the data was never supposed to be private.
The researcher attributed the leak to the government's inconsistency in records management operations, the lack of expertise of Russian staff and the lack of internal monitoring solutions that could have alerted operators to the data exposed.
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