Millions of South African users are among those affected by a massive new data leak.
Cybernews researchers report that a data exposure affects more than 250-million identity records across seven countries, including Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Mexico, South Africa and Canada.
Three misconfigured servers — hosted on IP addresses in Brazil and the UAE — contained detailed personal information, resembling government-level identity profiles, and are now confirmed to have been publicly accessible.
“It’s likely that these databases were operated by a single party, due to the similar data structures, but there’s no attribution as to who controlled the data, or any hard links proving that these instances belonged to the same party,” according to the research team.
The leaked information includes ID numbers, full names, dates of birth and gender, contact details and home addresses.
The number of records exposed, per country, are:
- Turkey (88 396 572 records)
- Egypt (77 744 912 records)
- Saudi Arabia (26 827 301 records)
- UAE (4 856 942 records)
- Mexico (8 740 000 records)
- South Africa (44 472 288 records)
- Canada (9 322 549 records)
Cybernews has contacted the hosting providers and, as of now, the data is no longer publicly accessible.