Personal data of all 6.5 mn Israeli voters leaked

Jerusalem, Feb 11 (IANS) In a massive breach, an election app named Elector in use by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party exposed sensitive personal data — including identity card numbers, full names and addresses of the country’s entire national voting registration of about 6.5 million citizens.

The Authority for Defending Privacy issued a statement Monday night that it had opened a probe into the actions of multiple parties involved in Likud’s leak of the personal information of close to 6.5 million Israeli voters, The Jerusalem Post reported on Monday.

The statement said that the authority would probe both the Likud officials responsible and third parties hired by the party, who had obligations to protect the personal data, the report added.

The massive breach was tied to a mobile app used by PM Netanyahu and his Likud party to communicate with voters, offering news and information about the March 2 election.

The flaw, first reported by the newspaper Haaretz, was the latest in a long series of large-scale software and data breaches that demonstrated the inability of governments and corporations around the world to safeguard people’s private information and ensure the integrity of electoral systems, according to The New York Times.

According to an Israeli investigative website focused on the media industry, the Elector app’s web version was sloppily written, thus, allowing anybody using a simple browser to obtain high-level access to the full database.