South Africans are becoming increasingly concerned about the massive data leak that hit SA. The man who found the leak has shared a site people can check for their info.
About 27 gigabytes of data containing the names, full identity numbers, income, employment history and even home addresses of 33 million South Africans has been uploaded onto the internet. Australian-based security developer Troy Hunt was the one who found out about the data leak and took steps to inform the South African public.
Troy took to his Twitter to explain that he had loaded the email addresses of the leaked information onto ‘Have I Been Pwned‘ so people would be able to check if their data was leaked. The only problem is that of the 33 million peoples personal data shared, only 2.2 million of them had email addresses linked to the data.
“I’ve now loaded the *email addresses only* for the South African “Master Deeds” breach into @haveibeenpwned”
“Note that there are only 2.2 million email addresses but tens of millions of actual identities in the source database”
According to EWN, this is the largest data leak in South African history.
It’s unclear at this stage if the leak was the result of a hack or negligence, or which company is the source of the data.
While the State Security Agency has not commented on the breach, it’s understood the matter is being investigated.
You can check if your email address was present in the data leak here. We encourage all our readers to remain vigualint with their accounts and to change passwords wherever possible.
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