News

Data breach may affect 50 mln people in Turkey

Wednesday 6 April 2016 00:22 CET | News

A breach of the Turkish national database has confirmed that it contains personal information of around 50 million people.

The leaked data included the National Identifier (TC Kimlik No), first name and last name, mother’s and father’s first name, gender, date and city of birth and full address. The Turkish national ID number system is used to enable access to a number of government services, like taxation, voting, education, social security, health care and military recruitment.

Alex Cruz Farmer, VP of cloud at NSFOCUS IB, said at the time of writing, the validity of the data has not been confirmed, but it could go down as one of the largest data breaches in history for some time. He added the governments are often the most targeted for cyber-attacks and, as we have learned, it only takes one single field on a website to compromise an entire infrastructure.

Another security expert, Robert Capps, VP of business development at NuData Security, said that with the level of information released in the recent Turkish breach, criminals have solid profiles on individuals that can be used to create new bank accounts, access existing accounts, or acquire false Government issued identification documents in order to perpetuate all manner of malfeasance, including financial crimes and terrorism.

 


Free Headlines in your E-mail

Every day we send out a free e-mail with the most important headlines of the last 24 hours.

Subscribe now

Keywords: data breach, account takeover, cybercrime, online fraud, Turkey
Categories: Fraud & Financial Crime
Companies:
Countries: World
This article is part of category

Fraud & Financial Crime






Industry Events