The data of all residents of Georgia were in the public domain due to the negligence of the German cloud

The German supplier of cloud services could inadvertently disclose the personal data of all residents of Georgia, the researchers in the field of cybersecurity found. They identified two databases available without passwords with entries about residents of the country.

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The discovery was made by cybersecurity expert Bob Dyachenko from SecurityDiscovery.com. He said he discovered an Elasticsearch index without password protection that contained “an extensive set of personal data” belonging to residents of Georgia. The index was compiled from two databases: one had about 5 million, the other more than 7 million records. Given that the population of Georgia is less than 4 million people, there is reason to assume that even if there are duplicate records as a result of an incident, everyone in the country is exposed to the risk of data theft, phishing and other threats.

The archives contained citizens’ identification numbers (possibly Social Security numbers), their full names, dates of birth, gender, telephone numbers and other confidential information. “The data appears to have been collected or aggregated from multiple sources, presumably from government or commercial databases and identification services,” the experts said. The server hosting the databases belonged to a German cloud service provider and was taken offline shortly after the incident was made public.

Many questions remained unanswered: whether the cloud provider was aware of the incident, whether the cybercriminals managed to steal data before shutting down the resource, and whether the database was moved to another location. Finally, it was not possible to establish whose fault this leak occurred, which means that it is unlikely that this person will be held accountable.