Nearly 1 Million South African’s Exposed in Latest Data Leak

We have yet another data leak to report on today. This time, South African’s who had to pay any kind of traffic fine may be affected.

We’re already heading into the next month, but it seems that remnants of last months massive number of security incidences is spilling into this month.

Personal information related to South African’s was posted on an unsecured server. In all, 934,000 records were exposed. Those records contained identity numbers, e-mail addresses, full names and passwords. The leak was discovered by security researcher Troy Hunt. From Times Live:

“This is yet another reminder of how far our data can spread without our knowledge. In this case‚ in particular‚ the presence of plain-text (unencrypted) passwords poses a serious risk because inevitably‚ those passwords will unlock many of the other accounts victims of the breach use. This one incident has likely already led to multiple other breaches of online accounts due to that reuse‚” said Hunt to iAfrikan.

Hunt is founder of the website haveibeenpwned‚ which allows users to check if their personal information has been compromised online. He said people would be able to verify if their data was included in the latest leak by visiting the site later on Thursday.

iAfrikan said it had alerted the Hawks and South Africa’s Information Regulator about the leak.

This is one of the last leaks we’ve become aware of in what has been one wild month last month. The month of May just seemed like one long continuous string of security incidences. It started with a data breach which saw 34.5 million Aadhaar accounts exposed. Chili’s came next with an unknown number of credit cards compromised in a data breach. This was followed up with the University of Cambridge which suffered a data leak that exposed 3 million Facebook accounts. From there, probably one of the scariest data leaks involved LocationSmart which exposed realtime geolocation data on potentially any American on any major US ISP.

Ordinarily, that is about the number of security incidences we’d expect in a month. Unfortunately, May was no ordinary month. The leaks and breaches just kept coming. We saw the Los Angeles 211 crises and abuse line suffer a leak that exposed 3.2 million records. Then came the Comcast data leak which exposed their Xfinity customers. From there was the data breach that made major headlines across Canada where CIBC and the Bank of Montreal got hacked and had tens of thousands of customers exposed. Finally, AgentRun suffered a data leak which saw the exposure of thousands of files.

While we are in a new month, this latest incident actually made headlines towards the end of last month. As such, that incident pushed the number of incidences we’ve become aware of to a whopping 10. That’s close to one every three days.

An interesting question is going to be, is this next month going to be more of this or will things finally settle down? Only time will tell at this stage.

Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Google+.

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