Turkey launches probe into personal 'data leak'
Turkish authorities have launched an investigation into the release of personal information of some 50 million citizens by hackers, state media say.
On Wednesday, federal prosecutors in Ankara opened an investigation into the data leak which exposed names, identity numbers, and addresses of some 49,611,709 people online, earlier this week.
According to Turkish Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag, the number of people whose information was leaked, nearly most of the country’s 78 million, is comparable to the number of voters on the electoral register.
"Where this was leaked from, finding out how it was leaked, is what the investigation needs to focus on," the justice minister said.
Bozdag added that the country’s election commission shares such information on the electoral register with different political parties.
On April 4, the unnamed hackers’ group loaded a 6.6-gigabyte file online which also included information it claimed belonged to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and former president, Abdullah Gul, pointing to the government’s weakness in its protection of data. The data has not yet been verified.
A message posted by the group also criticized Erdogan, accusing him of “destroying” Turkey “beyond recognition.”
Ankara also experienced a similar data leak back in 2010, which prompted the government to begin work on a new data protection law.
Last December, Turkey came under a massive cyber-attack by the hacktivist group, Anonymous, with the group accusing Ankara of supporting Daesh terrorists operating in neighboring Syria and Iraq “by buying their oil and tending to their injured fighters.”
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