For years, security experts have warned governments that national ID schemes, ID Data stockpiles and other systems that harvest and store large volumes of sensitive personal information are high risk targets that can and will become the object of criminal desire.
Israel has learnt about this the the hard way.
In a classic demonstration of just how bad the "Insider Threat" is a contract worker in Israel's Welfare Ministry has stolen the entire database of the Israels equivalent program to the US Visit system containing the records of 9 million Israelis both living and deceased.
The contract worker it seems moonlighted as a low level white colar criminal dabbling in things like Identity Theft. He went on to distribute the database to 6 contacts in the Israeli underground, one of whom uploaded the entire database to "Bit Torrent" filesharing sites under the name "Agron 2006".
Google searches for this torrent show that it is now widely distributed with numerous clone torrents offering the database to anyone that cares to download it.
I hate to say I told you so... but.....
Hopefully other governments are watching and learning from Israel's predicament.
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