Pierluigi Paganini
March 24, 2021
A few hours before the election in Israel, hackers exposed the voter registration and personal details of millions of citizens. The source of the data seems to be the app Elector developed by the software firm Elector Software for the Israeli political party Likud.
Exposed data include residential addresses, phone numbers, and dates of birth of the registered voters, which appear to be from another data breach leak that took place a year ago. Anyway, the media reported that at least one file includes people’s full names and their assigned voting stations, which appear to be updated to the current voting round.
“The data was exposed after hackers made threats last week against Elector Software Ltd., the operators of the voter-prompting Elector App, which is used by the ruling Likud party and several others.” reported Calcalist. “The threats, some of which were sent directly to the company, included warnings that the attackers would leak data that was allegedly stolen from the app, as well as personal information on the company’s CEO Tzur Yemin, and his family unless the app ceases operating. “This is an extortion attempt and I have filed a complaint to the police,” Tzur told Calcalist.”
The hackers initially shared links to download the data they claim to have stolen. The files were encrypted, while the threat actors was threatening to distribute the password unless use of the Elector app was discontinued.
“The passwords will be distributed in the coming days if they choose to continue lying,” the attackers wrote. “You don’t have long left until information about your family is exposed too.”
Early this week, the hackers released the password via websites that don’t require registration allowing anyone to access them. The attackers, identified as “The Israeli Autumn,” declared they were “forced” to release the information due to the failure of authorities to deal with Elector.
Exposed files included names and ballot numbers of all 6,528,565 eligible voters and the personal details of over 3 Million Israeli citizens (full names, phone numbers, ID card numbers, home addresses, gender, age, and political preferences).
In February, a misconfiguration in an election day app developed by the Netanyahu’s party Likud have exposed personal details of over 6.5 million Israelis. The incident was reported by Verizon Media developer Ran Bar-Zik, and several Israeli media ([1], [2], [3], [4]) confirmed the data leak.
Bar-Zik discovered the huge trove of data while was performing a security audit of the Elector app.
“Netanyahu is actually sending Likud activists into a serious security breach, one of the most serious that has been exposed in recent years in Israel.” reads the post published by Calcalist. “Because a major security failure in Elector’s app and system revealed all the Likud’s voter data ahead of the upcoming elections: a huge database of voters and containing up-to-date personal information – ID, full name, address, and phone – of close to 6.5 million Israelis with voting rights.”
It is not clear if the leaked information was accessed also by unauthorized parties before it was discovered, but recent leak could confirm this circumstance.
The analysis of the source code of the app revealed the presence of a link to an API endpoint that used to authenticate the site’s administrators.
The expert pointed out that the API doesn’t require any authentication to be used to query the application are receive the site’s administrators’s data in cleartext, including their passwords.
Once obtained the credentials, Bar-Zik used them access to the site’s backend, including a database that contained the personal details of 6,453,254 Israeli citizens.
The database was an official and up to date copy of Israel’s voter registration database, which each managed by any party before the election.
Following the discovery of the data leak, the official website of the Elector app was took down
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(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Israeli voters)
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