Passport Canada leaks applicant's data

by ianivs | December 4, 2007 at 08:51 am
608 views | 5 Recommendations | 1 comment

While applying for a new passport an Ontario man discovered that he could see other people's application data by slightly changing the URL of the page he was on. The data included social insurance numbers, driver's license, addresses, phone numbers and other pieces of ID. The perfect recipe for identity theft.


Passport Canada took the website down after being notified of the breach and put it back online claiming the problem was fixed. But some data was still viewable after the "fix".


A security flaw in Passport Canada's website has allowed easy access to the personal information - including social insurance numbers, dates of birth and driver's licence numbers - of people applying for new passports.
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Barbara McPherson
Barbara McPherson
flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 15:36 on December 4th, 2007

ianivs, thanks for bringing this to us.  This is an unforgivable disregard for people's privacy.  When some crook runs up debts in our name, we're the ones left holding the bag. 

This story was created over 3 months ago, the comment thread is now closed.

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