It took us more than 100x deciding back and forth on whether we should blog about the fact that the hacked Philippines COMELEC data is now in an easy to use search engine website. The main argument is whether or not we should share the URL of the abusive website. However, we believe that as bloggers we have the moral duty not only to inform but to also make sure that our duty to inform will not contribute to the damage. In this case ,we believe that further sharing of the URL will only aggravate the situation. We are not out to gain traffic, we are out to inform techies and non-techies through this blog. So please bear with us if we do not share the URL here.
The Story
If you have been following our blog you know that the COMELEC website was hacked and its Database was leaked. An update to that story is that one of the suspects is now in the custody of the National Bureau of Investigation. Unfortunately, the leaked data was used and turned into an easy to search website, where you just enter the name of the person you are searching for and if he/she is in the database you will be able to see his/her birthday, precinct and address. Some new voters’ fingerprint scan code was also evident in the search as well as some other private data.
How to fight this
To fight this here are some things we can do
- Report the abusive website to https://www.cloudflare.com/abuse/form this is because by simple whois query shows that the site uses CloudFlare. By reporting this website, we are taking one step towards stopping this data leak.
- Another way to fight this is by NOT SHARING the URL via social media or any other channels, remember curiosity is a motivator, by not sharing we are stopping the spread of information and curiosity. This is why we had to think more than 100x if we are to report this on our blog. We decided to proceed but keeping in our responsibility to highlight the issue on how to fight this.
- Do not join in – sometimes people are easily swayed by the crowd, sometimes we think that if others are doing it then we can also do it. By visiting the website we are encouraging others to create the same, especially so that the website owner is trying to earn from Google Adsense as evidenced by the presence of ads in the abusive site.
Breach of our Data privacy is a serious issue and we have to do our part in order to solve this problem. Let us control our curiosity, and just be contented with the information in this blog post. For those who are already aware of the abusive websites’ URL do your part by reporting it via https://www.cloudflare.com/abuse/form.
