The personal records of most of Ecuador’s population leaked

ZDNet learned that the personal records of most of Ecuador’s population (including children) have been exposed online due to database misconfiguration. Two weeks ago, vpnMentor security researchers, Noam Rotem and Ran Locar discovered the database leak. This should be one of the biggest data breaches in Ecuador’s history, and Ecuador is a small South American country with 16.6 million citizens.

The leaked database contains a total of approximately 20.8 million user records, which is greater than the total population of the country, possibly due to duplicate records or old entries, including data from the deceased. This data is distributed across different indexes. These indexes contain different information that stores user details such as name, family members, civil registration data, financial and work information, and car ownership data.

Some data seems to be collected from government sources, and some data seems to be collected from private databases. These data include the full name of the citizen, home addresses, marital status, cedulas (national ID numbers), work/job information, phone numbers, and education levels.

However, things did not stop there. Security researchers found that the entire database also contained a large amount of children’s information. Specifically, it contains approximately 6.77 million entries for children under the age of 18. These entries contain information such as name, place of birth, home address, and gender.