IGP: Police suspicious about latest data breach

KUALA LUMPUR: The latest data breach involving organ donors is suspicious as it was leaked to Lowyat.net by the same source as the mobile phone data breach, said Inspector-General of Police Tan Sri Mohamad Fuzi Harun (pic).

“We find it suspicious and we will be in contact with the website administrators regarding this case. The case is being investigated by the Commercial Criminal Investigation Department,” he said after officiating the hand-over of a book of  CID investigation guidelines at the Sogo shopping centre on Wednesday (Jan 23).

According to the local tech site, the latest breach saw the personal details of more than 220,000 people who pledged their organs in Malaysia leaked online.

The information leak included pledger codes, full names, MyKad and old IC numbers, birth dates, ages, nationalities, races, genders, addresses, e-mails and phone numbers.

Screenshots posted on the site claimed to contain data of 220,394 pledgers who signed up between January 2009 and August 2016.

The data, divided into files based on the year of sign-up, also allegedly contained details of donor’s next of kin, their names, addresses and phone numbers.

The site claimed the data was most likely taken from a central database, as the details appeared to be from government hospitals as well as National Transplant Resource Centres.

The site claimed the leak was part of a bigger breach involving Malaysian organisations between September and November 2016 but contained no personal information of individuals.

Mohamad Fuzi said that little progress was made on the probe into the previous data breach that saw personal details of some 46.2 million mobile number subscribers in Malaysia leaked last year.

“The case is under the Malaysian Communication and Multimedia Commission's jurisdiction and we are only assisting them.We tracked the IP of the breach to four countries overseas and haven’t been able to move further with the case so far,” he said.