Bangladesh data breach exposes millions’ personal information

TechCrunch reports that millions of Bangladeshi citizens had their personal data, including full names, email addresses, phone numbers, and national ID numbers, exposed by a government website. Discovering the data leaked from the government site "was too easy," according to Bitcrack Cyber Security researcher Viktor Markopoulos, who immediately notified the Bangladeshi e-Government Computer Incident Response Team after identifying the data exposure by accident on June 27. "It just appeared as a Google result and I wasn't even intending on finding it. I was Googling an SQL error and it just popped up as the second result," Markopoulos. Moreover, the legitimacy of the leaked data has been verified by TechCrunch, which was able to yield the correct data using 10 different datasets through the website's public search tool. Markopoulos noted that the exposed data may be exploited by threat actors to enable National Identity Card application access, changes, or deletion, and Birth Registration Record Verification access.