Personal data of 50 million Bangladeshis leaked from government website
DHAKA, Bangladesh (AA) – Bangladesh is investigating the leakage of data related to more than 50 million of its citizens.
The data was stolen from a government website.
A cybersecurity specialist, Viktor Markopoulos, said he was able to access the data through a simple Google search.
The data includes names, phone numbers, email addresses, and National Identity Card numbers (NID).
The U.S. online portal TechCrunch reports that the leaked data is authentic.
They were able to confirm the data by using part of it to query a public search tool on the government website in question.
“The leaked data is legitimate by using a portion to query a public search tool on the affected government website,” said TechCrunch.
“By doing this, the website returned other data contained in the leaked database, such as the name of the person who applied to register, as well as — in some cases — the name of their parents. We attempted this with 10 different sets of data, which all returned correct data.”
The website containing the leaked data has not been identified.
But according to TechCrunch, it is still available online.
In Bangladesh, every citizen 18 years of age and older is issued a national identity card that assigns each citizen a unique number.
The card is mandatory and allows citizens to access utility services.
A Bangladeshi government official, Sukanta Chakraborty, told Türkiye’s Anadolu news agency that the security breach is under investigation.
He urged victims not to worry about the leak.
“Such data leak incidents often happen across the world. We cannot deny it. Therefore, this is not a question of ability or competency on cyber security rather it is a global problem–of which, we are not out of it,” he said.
In 2016, hackers stole nearly $1 billion from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York account owned by Bangladesh’s central bank.
However, Bangladesh made little progress in recovering the money.
In 2016, hackers stole nearly $1 billion from the account of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York that belonged to the central bank of Bangladesh. Bangladesh was fortunate that the hackers made away with less than one-tenth the amount of the biggest cyber heist in history.
Bangladesh, however, made little progress in recovering the money.
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