An election application used by Israel’s Likud party has exposed the personal information of over 6 million voters.
Likud, the party of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has contracted a company named Feed-b to create an election management system called Elector, which has been advertised as highly secure.
Developer and journalist Ran Bar-Zik discovered that the source code of the Elector website, which could easily be accessed by anyone from a browser using the “view page source” option, included administrator credentials. Using those credentials, anyone could have easily gained full access to the Elector application and all the data it stored.
According to Israeli newspaper Haaretz, political parties are provided a copy of the voter registry leading up to an election, but they cannot share it with third parties and they have to erase the information after the election.
In this case, Likud’s application exposed 6,453,254 voter records, including names, identity card numbers, addresses and, in some cases, phone numbers and family information.
Feed-b told Haaretz that it quickly patched the vulnerability and implemented additional security measures.
Bar-Zik said he had identified several security issues in the Elector app, including APIs that can be used without authentication, the lack of two-factor authentication, no logging systems, and the lack of a mechanism for detecting suspicious activity.
This is not the first time someone has exposed a voter database. Similar incidents reported in the past few years involved voters in the United States, Mexico and the Philippines.
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Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
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