Election Commission (EC) officials have admitted that the personal information of the country’s Smart National Identity Card (NID) citizens is now publicly available on a Telegram channel.According to EC data, NID server has data of 12 crore citizens. Among them, 5.5 crore citizens have smart NIDs.
Many people say that people’s name, phone number, address, photo and other information are available by giving the 10-digit NID number in Telegram.
Muhammad Ashraf Hussain, system manager of EC’s NID branch, told The Daily Star that he came to know about the matter last Tuesday. But he does not know who is behind the Telegram channel.
He said it was detected that the information was leaked through only one of the 174 organizations that had access to the NID server .
Appropriate measures are being taken in this regard, added Ashraf Hossain. However, he did not say through which organization this information was leaked.
Organizations take information from the Election Commission for their portals. Sometimes their portals have vulnerabilities and end up in situations like this, he said.However, the director general of the NID branch, AKM Humayun Kabir, said that the NID server is safe, stating that he is not aware of the matter.
TechCrunch, an online news media based on information technology in the United States, said in a report on July 7 that the personal information of about five million Bangladeshi citizens was leaked from a government website.
ICT State Minister Junaid Ahmed Palak then said that this information was leaked through the server of the Registrar General’s office, a government agency.The leaked information includes citizens’ names, phone numbers, email addresses and national identity card numbers.
Following this incident, ICT experts recommended that the EC conduct round-the-clock monitoring of the organizations receiving services from the NID server.
At the same time, they also advised the EC to conduct server vulnerability assessment and server penetration tests at regular intervals to identify NID server vulnerabilities.
Jehangir Alam, a resident of Mirpur in the capital who is angry about the leak of NID information, told Daily Star that the leak of personal information is a threat to my personal security.
