App Gone Wrong: Israel Suffers a Major Data Breach Affecting Nearly 6.5 Million Israelis

News Staff : Feb 11, 2020
JNS.org

Pray that the personal information of affected Israelis doesn't fall into the hands of those who'd do them harm.

[JNS.org] Israel's Likud Party is being accused of causing one of the most serious data breaches in Israeli history, and of gross violations of Israeli privacy laws, following the exposure on the Internet of the private information of all 6,454,254 registered Israeli voters. (Image: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Knesset speaker Yuli Edelstein during a Likud Party meeting at the Knesset /Credit: Olivier Fitoussi-Flash90 /via JNS)

The leak itself is being blamed on Elector, an application used by Likud, the Shas and Yisrael Beiteinu parties, as well as by some parties abroad, to manage their election campaigns. As first reported by Israeli investigative website Seventh Eye, which focuses on the media industry, the Elector app's webpage was improperly coded, granting administrator access to the databases stored by the application.

According to a petition filed last week, the Likud Party had created a database of all registered Israeli voters using its access to the official Central Elections Committee (CEC) voter registry, and then shared that database with its supporters via the Elector app.

Included in the database was not only the voter registry information—including ID numbers, full names and home addresses—of almost 6.5 million eligible Israeli voters, but also much more detailed information on tens of thousands of Likud supporters, on whom Likud volunteers had collected additional details over the past month, which they added to the database, according to Calcalist. Subscribe for free to Breaking Christian News here

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org