Mega Hack Exposes Philippine Voter Database

A massive database breach last month of the Philippines' Commission on Elections (COMELEC) leaked online the personal information of over 50 million Filipino voters. 

On March 27, the COMELEC website was attacked by a hacker group claiming to be Anonymous, who left a message on the homepage of the website accusing the commission of not properly securing voting machines for the country’s upcoming election. Another associated hacking group, LulzSec Pilipinas, shared a link to the entire COMELEC database of 338GB, comprising data on 54.36 million registered voters.

According to The Guardian, a huge amount of sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) including the fingerprints of 15.8 million individuals and passport information of around 1.3 million overseas voters, had been leaked. “I want to emphasise that the database in our website is accessible to the public. There is no sensitive information there. We will be using a different website for the election, especially for results reporting and that one we are protecting very well,” a COMELEC spokesman said in a statement.

For more details about the mega breach, read the Guardian article.