Data leaked due to technical issue, not hacking: Palak

Recently, the personal information of crores of Bangladeshi citizens was leaked from a government website. State Minister for ICT Zunaid Ahmed Palak said this was not a hacking incident, but merely a technical issue.

"No one hacked the website. There was a technical error, so the data became public. However, there is no way of avoiding responsibility in this case," he said.

The state minister made the remarks while speaking at the inauguration ceremony of the Bangabandhu International Cyber Security Awareness Award, organised by Bangladesh Hi-Tech Park Authority at the ICT Tower in Dhaka on Sunday.

Earlier, the e-Government Computer Incident Response Team (CIRT) issued advice for the citizens to avoid a repeat of such an unfortunate situation.

In a press release issued Saturday evening, the CIRT said their team has started a thorough investigation into the matter.

Meanwhile, the release also listed several pieces of advice to prevent a repeat of such incidents.  According to the CIRT, there is a need to increase capacity to deal with the growing cyber threats. Important services such as DNS, NTP and network middleboxes should be secured as well as ensuring that these are not exposed to the Internet.

Apart from this, all customers, consumers and employees should be provided with the necessary training to ensure access to necessary information on cyber security. This should be done so that any inconsistency or anything suspicious can be reported to the concerned authorities.

"Monitor network and user activity at all times," CIRT advised.

"Conduct regular system vulnerability reviews and penetration tests (VAPTs)."

Personal information of Bangladeshi citizens, including full names, phone numbers, email addresses and national ID numbers, was recently leaked from a government website, TechCrunch reported on Saturday.

According to the US-based website focusing on high-tech and startup news, a researcher named Viktor Markopoulos accidentally discovered the leak on June 27.

The researcher, working for Bitcrack Cyber Security, contacted the Bangladeshi e-Government Computer Incident Response Team (CIRT) shortly afterwards.

TechCrunch claimed it was able to verify the data leak. However, it did not disclose the website from where the data was leaked.

/KN/