[HN Gopher] Turkish citizens' personal data offered online after...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Turkish citizens' personal data offered online after government
       site hacked
        
       Author : giuliomagnifico
       Score  : 205 points
       Date   : 2023-06-09 17:51 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (balkaninsight.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (balkaninsight.com)
        
       | xwdv wrote:
       | A lot of this stuff is readily available in the right Telegram
       | groups.
        
       | hashworks wrote:
       | This isn't the first time, it happened before sometime in 2015 I
       | think?
        
         | melvinmelih wrote:
         | Yep, I was able to find my family's records in that leak...
        
       | chalcolithic wrote:
       | pffft
       | 
       | Amateurs
       | 
       | Russian citizens' personal data is sold online before government
       | site gets hacked
        
         | [deleted]
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | SXX wrote:
         | That's true. In Russia databases of passport data sold on DVD
         | on local markets long before government had any real online
         | services.
        
           | morkalork wrote:
           | If you take what bellingcat posts at face value, the amount
           | of data about Russian citizens for sale is absolutely
           | comical:
           | 
           | https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/2020/12/14/navalny-
           | fsb-...
        
             | SXX wrote:
             | It's mostly not actual leaks though. Just result of
             | countless government beuracrats working for $300 / month.
             | Considering fact that some people going to die on
             | frontlines for $3000 / month leaking bunch of data for $100
             | is no brainer.
             | 
             | To give an example. Since authoritarian regime like
             | databases every hospital have to put data about every
             | appointment or vaccination into regional online database.
             | So every single doctor, technicial or their friend have
             | names, national insurance ID, home adress and passport data
             | for every single person who ever used medical services in
             | that region.
             | 
             | And since every phone number at least supposed to be
             | registered on passport data it's super easy to connect any
             | other non-government data leaks to specific person.
        
         | contingencies wrote:
         | Same in China.
        
         | daniel-cussen wrote:
         | [dead]
        
         | kryptiskt wrote:
         | In Sweden you can just buy all that data legally because it's
         | all public information.
        
       | erenkaplan wrote:
       | They never claimed the data...
        
       | data_maan wrote:
       | Wasn't there a similar breach in India a few years ago?
       | 
       | There should be a clause that governments have to step down if
       | breaches like that happen.
       | 
       | But until leaders, like Erdogan, themselves get doxxed and
       | trolled, probably nothing will be done.
        
         | mediumdeviation wrote:
         | The prime minister of Singapore was the target of a breach
         | against a healthcare provider in 2018
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_SingHealth_data_breach
        
         | mrguyorama wrote:
         | Or, you know, people could stop voting for authoritarian
         | assholes who don't care if bad things happen to average people
         | because that's not why they are in government anyway.
        
         | orhmeh09 wrote:
         | I can sell to you the Turkish president's address for a small
         | price of $1000. PM for details.
        
       | mrtksn wrote:
       | Turkey's govt actually has quite a robust IT infrastructure and
       | the Turkish citizens can do pretty much anything through the
       | turkiye.gov.tr portal. It's really useful, you can even cancel
       | subscriptions to services and utilities from there. You can book
       | appointments for documents services or hospitals, see all your
       | medical history or even heritage records.
       | 
       | These leaks keep appearing since many years but their origin is
       | not necessarily a hack of the government infrastructure. The
       | leaks usually occur at election cycles because the address based
       | electorate data is handled and processed by the political
       | parties(which are not exactly IT elites) and gets stolen or
       | leaked.
       | 
       | Then there were high profile hacks of large food delivery
       | services or other e-trade platforms.
       | 
       | All this resulted in people collecting and merging data from
       | multiple leaks and re-selling those.
       | 
       | Edit: At some point, all the lawyers were using this data to
       | track down people relevant to their court cases. They were
       | selling it in CD format back then. Scammers and other criminals
       | probably use this data too.
        
         | hachiroku wrote:
         | [dead]
        
         | mghfreud wrote:
         | Do the data shared with political parties contain real estate
         | deeds?
        
           | mrtksn wrote:
           | I'm not sure what exactly it contains but all those leaks
           | contain Name, Address and your national identity
           | number(something like social security number). It must also
           | contain the birthplace and date because the last elections
           | there was question over how many refugees got citizenship and
           | the opposition said they checked the birthplaces and the
           | number is not too high.
           | 
           | BTW, this data is available for the citizens too during the
           | election cycle so you can check who lives in the same
           | building with you and correct any mistakes. The list of the
           | electorate is also attached at the polls so anyone can check
           | for something fishy.
           | 
           | Then in Turkey there's this obsession with companies about
           | collecting as much as info possible about you, so when the
           | food delivery service is hacked the hackers now can easily
           | add your phone number, update your current address by
           | matching your national identity number because for some
           | reason they need to have that info to deliver some kebab.
           | 
           | Also, this national identity number is generated through some
           | algorithm which gives away your relatives and thanks to this,
           | the hackers can also build your social graph from the leaks.
           | Here is a repo about that algo:
           | https://github.com/kerematam/akrabatcno
           | 
           | AFAIK it's used in "your grandson had an accident and needs
           | emergency surgery, send this much money ASAP" scams.
        
         | jimmygrapes wrote:
         | Every time I try to search for a phone number (Bing/ddg) I get
         | pages and pages of clearly auto generated fake names associated
         | with numbers, all hosted on that same Turkish government
         | portal. I don't know why.
        
           | mrtksn wrote:
           | Interesting, Are you sure it's turkiye.gov.tr?
        
       | activiation wrote:
       | Website sorgupaneli.org down
        
       | phantom32 wrote:
       | I think there have been multiple leaks in the past, and this
       | website is not the first either...
        
       | lr4444lr wrote:
       | Why haven't the authorities moved in on the host of the site
       | offering the data?
        
         | 3327 wrote:
         | [dead]
        
       | 19h wrote:
       | Is that old information? I'm sure I have a dump on most Turkish
       | civilians from a few years back... it also includes data on
       | Erdogan, his birth place and ID number.
        
       | treesciencebot wrote:
       | Be aware that the website(s) tied to this event has been down for
       | quite a while and there are no concrete evidence that any of them
       | have really worked. There were a few leaks back in the 2010s but
       | nothing recently has come up (lots of claims, no real proof).
        
       | commitpizza wrote:
       | My country publishes everyones data which then is offered by a
       | number of services: https://mrkoll.se as an example.
       | 
       | I wrote a blog article about it:
       | https://commit.pizza/2022/10/16/the-only-way-of-being-anonym...
        
       | RajT88 wrote:
       | The government has been silent on this so far, but I suspect the
       | underlying story could be described as 'Byzantine'.
        
       | belter wrote:
       | Join the party...
       | 
       | "Every Netherlands resident affected by data leak: watchdog" -
       | https://nltimes.nl/2023/06/06/every-netherlands-resident-aff...
       | 
       | "Medical Data of 500,000 French Residents Leaked Online (2021)" -
       | https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/500k-french-medic...
        
         | namaria wrote:
         | These days you just have to assume every piece of personal data
         | (and meta data about your online activity) eventually is made
         | public.
        
         | smcin wrote:
         | The Netherlands headline is alarmist and the full facts are not
         | in yet: they did _not_ say  "all residents' data had been
         | leaked; the number affected estimated at is 2+ million
         | (population 17.5m). [0] . The Dutch DPA did say they should use
         | a different password everywhere, use secure login, request
         | organizations to delete their data... _" Citizens must assume
         | that their personal data has already leaked or that this will
         | happen at some point"_.
         | 
         | Meanwhile: back in May 2020 a Dutch hacker obtained virtually
         | all Austrians' personal data (full name, gender, address, DOB),
         | police say [1]
         | 
         | [0]: https://www.iamexpat.nl/expat-info/dutch-expat-
         | news/millions...
         | 
         | [1]: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/dutch-hacker-
         | obtained-v...
        
       | m00dy wrote:
       | great, thanks. I'm now famous.
        
       | usdogu wrote:
       | It's not suprising. Turkish citizens' data is in the hands of 13
       | y.o kids since 2015.
        
         | x7ci wrote:
         | This is unfortunately true. The "MERNIS" leak is freely
         | available, containing some 49M citizens with their ID card
         | numbers, addresses and a lot more.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2023-06-09 23:00 UTC)