• Live
    • Audio Only
  • google plus
  • facebook
  • twitter
News > Ecuador

Private Data of 17M Ecuadoreans Leaked in Unsecured Server

  • Ecuadoreans citizens' private data breached and uploaded online.

    Ecuadoreans citizens' private data breached and uploaded online. | Photo: Reuters

Published 16 September 2019
Opinion

Official government ID numbers, phone numbers, family records, marriage dates, education histories, and work records were included in the exposed files.

Personal data of almost every Ecuadorean citizens was leaked online. Names, financial information, and other important data of about 17 million people, including 6.7 million children were found by a security company vpnMentor

RELATED:

Israel Will Begin Training Ecuadorean Military Units

The data was sitting in an unsecured Amazon cloud server open to the public. 

"The data breach involves a large amount of sensitive personally identifiable information at the individual level," wrote Noam Rotem and Ran Locar, from vpnMentor.

Ecuador’s computer emergency security team restricted the data and no one can access it now.

Official government ID numbers, phone numbers, family records, marriage dates, education histories, and work records were included in the exposed files. 

"This data breach is particularly serious simply because of how much information was revealed about each individual," the security researchers said.

The information also included financial records like balances of customers of one Ecuadorean bank, tax records, official revenue, etc. 

Rotem and Locar said they found 18 GB of data was spread across a variety of filed saved on an unsecured server run by Novaestrat, Ecuadorean marketing, and analytics company. 

The data can reveal lists of wealthy Ecuadoreans, their home addresses, their children, cars, registration numbers and would be valuable in the hands of criminals. 

The company’s website says, "Make financial decisions with updated information of the entire Ecuadorian Financial System.”

The company, however, has no email address or phone number on the website and when ZDNet tried reaching to its employees through Facebook and Linkedin, they went unanswered. 

This is the second major data leak in South America in recent times. In August, 14.3 million voters records were exposed in Chile which is around 80 percent of the country’s population.

Comment
0
Comments
Post with no comments.