Voter 6.5m Israeli 3.2m Therecord: The personal data of almost 6.5 million Israeli citizens were leaked online two days before the parliamentary elections in Israel. Google Plus profiles, birthdays, street addresses, phone numbers and more were exposed through a hacking attack on Therecord.com.
On Monday Twitter started to fill with random names and phone numbers from the leaked database and many reacted in anger to what was seen as yet another example of cyber attacks targeting Israeli society ahead of this week’s election for its parliament.
“I’m sick of the cyber attacks on Israeli civilian targets,” one Twitter user by the name of @snirzochen commented Monday. “If it’s not Facebook, it’s Instagram and now Therecord,” he added.
The leak mainly affected users who signed up for a free text alerts service offered by Therecord.com over a year ago in September 2013. The database includes all the registration data from 6.5 million users who chose to register for the service and that data was also accessible on Google Plus profiles.
As of Tuesday evening, there was no information yet about who is behind the attack and whether they had stolen the data or “merely published” it.
The Israeli-based company managed to limit some damage by emailing every user whose address, date of birth and other personal details have been found in the database, including those not registered for their service. The message asked users to immediately change their passwords.
This is not the first time therecord.com gets hacked. In March 2013, the main website of therecord, as well as its Arabic and English versions, were defaced by supporters of Syrian President Bashar Assad, who also published false reports about casualties in the alleged Syrian civil war, claiming that Israel was bombing Lebanon and Gaza.
The online record is a news portal for the Arab sector in Israel and was founded in August 2000. It has a Facebook following of over one million people.
Leakage of private information on the internet is nothing new, especially not in Israel. A recent report by KrebsonSecurity shows that more than 20 million records have been stolen and leaked over the past two years, including ID card numbers, credit card details, passwords and login credentials.
Many of the sources that received files from these cyber attackers were Israeli companies, according to a recent report by Recorded Future. “Israeli expatriates are considered to be among the world’s most prolific and vulnerable sources,” it says. Leaked data was also sent to Israeli authorities, including the prime minister’s office, and politicians’ offices in several countries, including Germany and Italy.
The exposure of private information on the internet has been an ongoing security problem for Facebook in particular, which has been hit for several consecutive years. The latest leak came only a few days ago, with close to 400,000 users getting their emails and passwords exposed.
But this is not the first time therecord.com gets hacked. In March 2013, the main website of therecord.com, as well as its English and Arabic versions, were defaced by supporters of Syrian President Bashar Assad, who also published false reports about casualties in the alleged Syrian civil war, claiming that Israel was bombing Lebanon and Gaza.
The online record is an ethnic news portal for one of the Arab sectors in Israel and was founded in August 2000. It has a Facebook following of over 1 million people.
Leakage of private information on the internet is nothing new, especially not in Israel. A recent report by KrebsonSecurity shows that more than 20 million records have been stolen and leaked over the past two years, including ID card numbers, credit card details, passwords and login credentials.
Many of the sources that received files from these cyber attackers were Israeli companies, according to a recent report by Recorded Future. “Israeli expatriates are considered to be among the world’s most prolific and vulnerable sources,” it said.