Millions of South Africans’ personal information leaked in data breach
More than 30 million South Africans' information, including ID numbers, has been leaked online.
POLOKWANE – Information including property ownership, employment history, income and company directorships, has been discovered by information security researcher Troy Hunt, reports Tech Central.
Hunt is an Australian security researcher and creator of ‘Have I Been Pwned’. His website allows people to check if their personal information has been compromised in a data breach.
South African followers: I have a very large breach titled "masterdeeds". Names, genders, ethnicities, home ownership; looks gov, ideas?
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) October 17, 2017
Hunt said the database contained names of people, their gender, ethnicity, home ownership and contact information. The data also contained people’s identity numbers and other information like their estimated income and details of their employer.
He said the information appeared to be from a government agency.
The data trove was discovered among a large dump of other breaches and that to date, he hasn’t seen it offered for sale, but that “it is definitely floating around between traders.”
Incidentally, the file date on this data is April 2015. It’s unclear whether it’s been exposed this entire time https://t.co/jln8fQLOrk
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) October 18, 2017
Hunt says he has now loaded email addresses to the site and if readers want to find out whether their information has been breached they can visit the site and simply type in their email addresses.
Note that there are only 2.2 million email addresses but tens of millions of actual identities in the source database
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) October 18, 2017
I won't be loading the government issued IDs; these are sensitive personal identifiers that should be carefully guarded
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) October 18, 2017
He has also said that this breach should not be called a ‘hack’ as someone published the database of South Africa to the internet.
