First the volcano, now this
In a week when the Chaitén volcano awoke from a 300-year slumber to coat one of the areas of greatest national beauty in the world with toxic ash, Chile has been rocked by the largest ever per capita leakage of confidential personal data.
The Chilean technology blog FayerWayer warned on Saturday that a comment posted on the blog contained three links in CSV format that contained virtually all the personal data collected by government on six million of its citizens.
The hacker’s declared purpose was to illustrate the negligible level of cyber security employed by the Chilean government. Despite official denials, the point has certainly been made.
FayerWayer deleted the malicious post as soon as they discovered the links, and alerted the police. The blog subsequently wiped all the forums linked to its content and handed over its compulsory registry of all commentators to the Cybercrime Brigade of the police detective division.
The total population of Chile is around 16.3 million, making this the world’s largest single leakage of confidential personal data as a percentage of the affected population.
