Details of all 6.5 million Israeli voters leaked via app
Personal data of nearly 6.5 million Israeli voters was accessible through a political app. Likud, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s political party, uploaded the data to the app. Login information for the database was in the source code of the site.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz was told by an anonymous tipster that the voter data was on the street. According to the paper, the usernames and passwords of admin accounts could be found simply by looking at the source code of the Elector website. This made it possible to log in and download the complete database with voters’ personal data.
This concerns data from 6,453,254 Israelis, including names, identity card numbers, addresses, gender and in some cases telephone numbers and ‘other personal details’. Political parties in Israel receive such information before elections. Parties must properly protect the information and may not reproduce or supply the database to third parties. The database must be deleted after the elections.
Likud uploaded the database to the Elector app, its own ‘election management’ application, which is used, among other things, to display statistics during election day and to allow polling stations to exchange messages with each other. Feed-b, the company that developed the app, says the leak has been patched. Likud did not respond to questions from the newspaper.
The anonymous tipster provided the newspaper with personal details of key Israelis from the database. It is not known how many people have had access to the personal data. Haaretz notes that the app has users in several countries, including the US, China, and Russia. Lawyers have filed a request with the election commission to ban the use of the app.
According to the newspaper, privacy advocates have already warned against using the application. Publications TheMarker and Ha’ayin Hashivi’it previously announced that the app makes it possible to create databases that violate privacy legislation. The app asks users to provide additional details about the names of acquaintances and friends who may vote for Likud. Haaretz writes that Likud has been involved in several privacy scandals in the past. For example, the database of people who vote for the party has already been leaked several times via the internet. This time it concerns all voters in the country.