Personal data of 93.4 million Mexicans were in the public domain

    The database contains all Mexican citizens over 18 years old




    A 132 gigabyte database containing registration data for 93.4 million Mexican voters has gone online. The fact that the database is hosted by AWS and is available for viewing to everyone, said security specialist Chris Vickery of Kromtech, the developer of MacKeeper 1 .

    The database contains the name and surname of each citizen, full address, voter identification number, date of birth, parents' names, occupation, etc. According to Vickery , the information was available from MongoDB with an incorrect configuration.

    The specialist discovered the base on April 14 and immediately informed the US State Department and the Mexican Embassy about the leak of personal data, but within eight days did not receive a response from them. Amazon also did not respond to complaints.

    Only on April 22, Chris was able to contact the Mexican National Electoral Institute and ensure that the information was deleted from AWS. After that, he reported the incident on his blog. Mexican election commission officials confirmed the authenticity of the data.

    According to the expert, personal data has been in the public domain since September 2015, so it has probably already been distributed on the Internet and posted in other places. The identity of the account holder on AWS is still unknown. Representatives of the Electoral Institute saidthat they calculated the culprit who uploaded the database to the American AWS server - he was identified by the “watermarks” that were put down in each copy of the database that was provided for review to political parties. A criminal case has been instituted .

    According to Mexican laws, personal data of citizens is strictly confidential information, the publication of which provides for imprisonment for up to 12 years.

    Although some entries in the database are duplicated, but it contains information about all Mexican citizens over 18 years of age who have the right to vote. This is approximately 72% of the country's population.

    Mexico is not the first country to encounter a leak of personal information about most of its citizens. Previously open access bases of residents were seenBelize , Greece , Israel , Philippines and Turkey . And the same Chris Vickery previously reported on the base of 191 million American voters , which also "leaked" online due to the incorrect configuration of the DBMS ( edited screenshot ).

    1 Chris Vickery used to be an independent hacker, but in December 2015 he found 13 million MacKeeper user names and passwords online , after which Kromtech invited him to work .

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