14 DAY TRIAL // Hong Kong may be going through one of the most significant data breaches in its history after two computers holding personal data of 3.7 million voters have been stolen.
The report comes from the Hong Kong Registration and Electoral Office, and it seems the computers were taken from a locked room at the AsiaWorld-Expo on Lantau, according to the South China Morning Post.
The stolen data includes personal information on voters, like ID card numbers, addresses, and contact numbers, making for a rather important trove of information that could be worth a fortune on the dark web. The office says this data is encrypted and should be safe, but that isn't really any guarantee that the information won't leak or that the encryption won't be broken.
The devices also stored the names of the 1,200 electors on the Election Committee. While these names are publicly available, the rest of the information isn't, and it's sensitive enough to cause quite a stir.
The police are investigating the matter
The police are running an investigation into the matter, especially since there's so much sensitive personal information involved. No arrests have been made yet.
According to an official statement, the police says there hasn't been any information to indicate that the data has been leaked thus far.
There are also quite a few questions about why the general voters' data had been stored alongside that of committee members. "Perhaps they didn't put the voters'data in a proper place after last year's legislative elections, and then the devices were used for the chief executive election," a member of the Election Committee said on the matter, referencing the election for the Committee leadership which was held on Sunday.
Whether or not the data will end up on the dark web remains to be seen as it is, in the end, only a matter of time.