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Commission on Elections data breach
On March 27, 2016, hackers under the banner mac "Anonymous Philippines" hacked into the website of the Philippine Commission on Elections (COMELEC) and defaced it. The hackers left a message calling for tighter security measures on the vote counting machines (VCM) to be used during the 2016 Philippine general election on May 9. Within the day a separate group of hackers, LulzSec Pilipinas posted an online link to what it claims to be the entire database of COMELEC and updated the post to include three mirror link to the index of the database's downloadable files. The leaked files by LulzSec Pilipinas amounts to 340 gigabytes.
The COMELEC website returned to normal at 03:15 (PST) on 28 March 2016. COMELEC spokesperson, James Jimenez, stated on his Twitter account that, as they continue to scour the site, all databases would remain temporarily off.
The incident was considered the biggest private data leak in the Philippine history and leaving millions of registered voters at risk.
55 million registered voters are at risk due to the data breach according to security firm, Trend Micro potentially surpassing the Office of Personnel Management data breach which affected 20 million people.
A searchable website, called wehaveyourdata, was set up containing sensitive data on Filipino registered voters was set up as early as April 21. The website was taken down with the assistance of the U.S. Department of Justice since the domain of the website was bought from a US-based web hosting company. The website itself was found to be hosted in Russia.
Trend Micro conducted its own investigation on the extent of the data breach. It found that 1.3 million records of Overseas Filipino voters, which included passport numbers and expiry dates were included in the data dumps by the hackers. The security firm found the breach as "alarming" since it said that the data are easily accessible to the public were in plain text. It also added that 15.8 million record of fingerprints along with a list of people who have run for office since the 2010 elections were found by the firm's investigation.
The firm also found files concerning candidates running in the election with the filename "VOTESOBTAINED" which the firm infers to reflect the number of votes received by the particular candidates. It said that the figures of the "VOTESOBTAINED" files were set to NULL at the time Trend Micro conducted its investigation.
The Commission on Elections chairman, Andres Bautista said that he was told that no confidential information was leaked, saying the breach would not affect the election body's preparation for the 2016 elections. The commission also emphasized that the database on its website is accessible to the public and no sensitive information is hosted on the website. It said that the results website that the election body is planning will be hosted in a different website with a different and better set of security measures. It further added that the database might be fake saying that no biometrics date were compromised by the hackers as opposed to Trend Micro's findings. COMELEC also noted that Trend Micro accessed the dumped data by hackers on its investigation and said that it has no capability of validating the data since it had no access to its original database.
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Commission on Elections data breach
On March 27, 2016, hackers under the banner mac "Anonymous Philippines" hacked into the website of the Philippine Commission on Elections (COMELEC) and defaced it. The hackers left a message calling for tighter security measures on the vote counting machines (VCM) to be used during the 2016 Philippine general election on May 9. Within the day a separate group of hackers, LulzSec Pilipinas posted an online link to what it claims to be the entire database of COMELEC and updated the post to include three mirror link to the index of the database's downloadable files. The leaked files by LulzSec Pilipinas amounts to 340 gigabytes.
The COMELEC website returned to normal at 03:15 (PST) on 28 March 2016. COMELEC spokesperson, James Jimenez, stated on his Twitter account that, as they continue to scour the site, all databases would remain temporarily off.
The incident was considered the biggest private data leak in the Philippine history and leaving millions of registered voters at risk.
55 million registered voters are at risk due to the data breach according to security firm, Trend Micro potentially surpassing the Office of Personnel Management data breach which affected 20 million people.
A searchable website, called wehaveyourdata, was set up containing sensitive data on Filipino registered voters was set up as early as April 21. The website was taken down with the assistance of the U.S. Department of Justice since the domain of the website was bought from a US-based web hosting company. The website itself was found to be hosted in Russia.
Trend Micro conducted its own investigation on the extent of the data breach. It found that 1.3 million records of Overseas Filipino voters, which included passport numbers and expiry dates were included in the data dumps by the hackers. The security firm found the breach as "alarming" since it said that the data are easily accessible to the public were in plain text. It also added that 15.8 million record of fingerprints along with a list of people who have run for office since the 2010 elections were found by the firm's investigation.
The firm also found files concerning candidates running in the election with the filename "VOTESOBTAINED" which the firm infers to reflect the number of votes received by the particular candidates. It said that the figures of the "VOTESOBTAINED" files were set to NULL at the time Trend Micro conducted its investigation.
The Commission on Elections chairman, Andres Bautista said that he was told that no confidential information was leaked, saying the breach would not affect the election body's preparation for the 2016 elections. The commission also emphasized that the database on its website is accessible to the public and no sensitive information is hosted on the website. It said that the results website that the election body is planning will be hosted in a different website with a different and better set of security measures. It further added that the database might be fake saying that no biometrics date were compromised by the hackers as opposed to Trend Micro's findings. COMELEC also noted that Trend Micro accessed the dumped data by hackers on its investigation and said that it has no capability of validating the data since it had no access to its original database.