Russian voters' data on sale after the Blockchain poll to keep Putin in power

The data of 1,1 million Russian citizens were stolen and put up for sale for $ 1,50 each on some websites, the Russian newspaper Kommersant reported. The data, consisting solely of passport numbers, is of little value by itself, the sellers admitted in an anonymous response to Kommersant.

However, this data can be used for phishing attacks when combined with information from other databases that can be accessed in parallel.

Cyber ​​security at risk for citizens

The Moscow Department of Information Technologies, which is responsible for designing the voting system, denied the whole affair in a statement to the media. “The department is regularly monitoring the Internet for such data, including the darknet.

The database mentioned in the publication has nothing to do with the list of voters who have registered to vote online, ”the department's press office wrote, adding that the information on the Moscow City Hall servers has been adequately protected and "There have been no leaks since the beginning of 2020."

The survey

The online voting was part of a national poll devoted to amendments to the Russian constitution, which, among other things, considered removing the two-term restriction for presidents, effectively allowing Vladimir Putin to stay in power longer.

The online voting system, based on Bitfury's open source Exonum blockchain and built with the help of Kaspersky Lab, had poor data protection. Journalists were able to decrypt people's votes and extract passport numbers from a weakly protected file posted online by the authorities.

Voting took place in the last week of June and ended on July 1, both online and in physical polling stations. Employees of municipal authorities were forced to vote electronically, the BBC reported.

Russia aims to consolidate the practice of online voting

On Tuesday, in an official post, department representative Artyom Kostyrko said the department compared the screenshot provided by a vendor with the voter database and that the information is not verified.

However, according to the founder of the cybersecurity firm DeviceLock, Ashot Oganesyan, the database was genuine and has been on sale for some time. In Russia, every citizen over the age of 14 has a passport, which serves as a universal identity document for any kind of interaction with the government.

Each passport has a unique number and those numbers have been retrieved from the online voting system and put up for sale. Russia plans to consolidate the practice of online voting, despite the issues mentioned above.

A previous blockchain voting experiment took place in the fall of 2019 and used the Ethereum blockchain - here the quotation in real time of the major bitcoin contender. Again, a weak security system was encountered.