The data exposed included voter registration information for 6,528,565 Israelis and personal details for 3,179,313 Israelis from Israel’s estimated 9.3 million population overall.
The information contained included complete names, phone numbers, and ID card numbers. address of residence gender, age, and political leanings.
According to reports from Israeli media an actor who called himself “the Israeli Autumn” claimed responsibility for the leak. Media reports claimed they received emails from the weekend, including hyperlinks to a Ghostbin site that stores the data.
Raveed Laeb, a product manager for Israeli security firm KELA Raveed Laeb, product manager at Israeli threat intelligence business KELA, told The Record on Wednesday that since Monday, the information is being circulated freely through a variety of Telegram channels. Laeb found his personal data in the compromised documents.
As per the hackers, the information came from Elector the official website of an application developed by Elector Software for Likud, the Israeli political party headed by the current prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
On February 20, 2020, the Israeli web developer by the name of Ran Bar-Zik discovered that his application’s site had an API endpoint that let him get an inventory of the administrators of the website as well as their account details including passwords.
Bar-Zik claimed that he could access a database with the personal details of Israeli electors the use of passwords.
The results of the investigation, which Zik disclosed on his blog led to a major media scandal in Israel in early 2020 because political parties have access to the entire Israeli voter list for reasons such as campaign planning, but they aren’t allowed to share this data with other organizations.
In the meantime, Bar-Zik disclosed the web-based flaw to its parent company however, the web developer added that it was not clear whether other organizations had noticed the same issue prior to him and whether they had used the API to collect voter registration data for Israeli residents.
But Elector Chief Executive Officer Tzur Yamin has said that this information was sourced from his company as well as in a personal discussion in an interview with The Record and in an interview with The Calcalist, an Israeli magazine The Calcalist, where he said he was the victim of a plot to blackmail.
Despite claims in The Times of Israel indicating that there is a link between the two incidents, Bas-Zik, who reported on this leaked information for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz however, was unable to determine a connection between it and Elector.
A number of Israeli political experts last week suggested that the data could have been released to damage the Likud party’s image in the public eye and credibility. However, the leak appears to have had no effect in the sense that Likud is expected to prevail in the 2021 March Knesset elections.
The story has been updated by the CEO to reflect his remarks about the extortion plot and to clarify that the connection between the 2020 event and the leak hasn’t been officially established. 6.5m Israeli 3.2m Monday cimpanu
