Faizel Patel, Radio Islam News – 18-10-2017

South Africa has suffered its biggest data breach in history with about 30-million identity numbers and other personal and financial information being hacked and leaked on the Internet. 

BusinessLive  reports the data dump of about 27 gigabytes contained a wide range of sensitive information, including people’s 13-digit ID numbers, personal income, age, employment history, company directorships, race group, marital status, occupation, employer and previous addresses.

The business news site repots the hack was uncovered by Troy Hunt, a Microsoft regional director and a Microsoft most valuable professional for developer security.

Hunt who founded the website HaveIbeenpwned.com, which alerts registered users if their details have been compromised in corporate or website hacks is now attempting to identify the source of the database. 

He speculates it might have been sourced from a government database as it included the words “master_deeds”, while other commentators said it might have been a financial institution or credit bureau.

Earlier this year, Hunts website exposed SA’s latest major data breach after Ster-Kinekor’s website was hacked in 2016, exposing more than 6-million accounts including 1.6-million unique e-mail addresses.

In October Yahoo revealed all 3-billion of its accounts had been exposed during a large hack in 2013. The hack of US credit agency Equifax in September resulted in 145.5-million Americans’ personal details being revealed, following the 40-million customers credit card records stolen from US retailer Target during the 2013 Christmas period.

– BusinessLive

Twitter: @FaizelPatel143