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Turkish Citizenship Database Allegedly Leaked Online (businessinsider.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the gift-that-keeps-on-giving dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: The entire Turkish citizenship database has allegedly been hacked and leaked online. A website with purportedly leaked details of 49,611,709 Turkish citizens is online and allegedly gives the following details of each citizen -- including the Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan: National Identifier (TC Kimlik No), First Name, Last Name, Mother's First Name, Father's First Name, Gender, City of Birth, Date of Birth, ID Registration City and District, and Full Address. The apparent hack seems to be politically motivated. The website reads: "Who would have imagined that backwards ideologies, cronyism and rising religious extremism in Turkey would lead to a crumbling and vulnerable technical infrastructure?" The hack amounts to about 6.6GB worth of uncompressed files, which may make it one of the biggest data leaks of its kind in history. While The Register has also reported on the leak, some claim the leak has correct information but is just a decrypted version of data that was leaked over a couple of months ago. Specifically, the info contains data of Turkish citizens who voted in 2009 elections.

2 of 44 comments (clear)

  1. It's not even the biggest data leak this week by Nova+Express · · Score: 1, Informative

    That would be the Panama Papers, with more than 2.6 terrabytes of data on global financial asset hiding released, including documents implicating Putin and his cronies.

    --
    Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)

    http://www.lawrenceperson.com/

  2. Some Analysis by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Posting anon, for reasons that will soon be somewhat obvious.

    Through marriage, a significant percentage of my family is Turkish. So I downloaded and installed the database this afternoon to see what's in there.

    First off, the data appears to be accurate. Most of our (large number of) family members are in there.

    What's somewhat more interesting is who isn't there. Children under 18 are predominately missing. This is actually interesting, as it helps denote boundaries for the database. A family member who turned 18 in 1991 is present, but her younger brother who turned 18 in 2011 is missing. Another family member who moved in 2012 is still listed under their old address. A family member who died in 2008 is missing (as expected).

    With a bit of data conversion, it's possible to pull the youngest person out of the database -- their birthdate is listed as March 29th, 1991. As the database seems to exclude people under 18 (age of majority for elections in Turkey), this would potentially date the database to on or around March 29, 2009. Interestingly enough, there were local elections in Turkey on March 29th, 2009, so the thought that this might be an election database appears to be correct.

    On the downside, I have a lot of friends and family members to contact in Turkey to let them know their information has been leaked. On the positive side, I won't miss a birthday ever again...