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Taiwan Central Election Commission faces data leak allegations
The Taiwan Forward Line has accused the Central Election Commission (CEC) of a major data breach involving the personal identification numbers of 1,573 political candidates. The leak reportedly included 81 mayoral candidates and 1,492 legislative candidates, with sensitive information exposed for approximately 11 days.
According to the Taiwan Forward Line, the identification numbers were accessible via the background data of the candidate property declaration system. They claim that any user could download the data without an account or password by using browser developer tools, contradicting CEC claims that the data was unreadable due to encoding errors.
The CEC responded by stating that the official PDF documents published on October 16 had all personal information masked. The commission attributed the leak to an outsourced vendor who inadvertently included identification numbers in a non-public query file. The CEC maintained that the file appeared as garbled text to most users, though they have since suspended the service, implemented fixes, and launched an investigation in accordance with the Personal Data Protection Act.
Entities
Central Election Commission · Chiang Wan-an · Jiang Wan-an · Shen Po-yang · Taiwan · Taiwan Forward Line · Wang Wan-yu
Claims
What the coverage asserts, and how many sources carry each claim.
- [○ 1 SOURCE] The CEC has suspended the affected website service to perform corrections. www.epochtimes.com
- [● 2 SOURCES] The CEC has launched an investigation into the incident. www.cryptocity.tw · www.epochtimes.com
- [● 2 SOURCES] The CEC attributed the leak to an error by an outsourced vendor. www.cryptocity.tw · www.epochtimes.com
- [○ 1 SOURCE] The leak included 81 mayoral candidates and 1,492 legislative candidates. news.nextapple.com
- [○ 1 SOURCE] The CEC stated that the leaked file appeared as garbled text and was unreadable by the general public. www.epochtimes.com
- [○ 1 SOURCE] The official PDF documents released by the CEC had personal information masked. www.epochtimes.com
- [● 3 SOURCES] The Taiwan Forward Line alleges that 1,573 candidates' ID numbers were exposed. news.nextapple.com · newpowerparty.tw · www.epochtimes.com
- [○ 1 SOURCE] The data was exposed for approximately 11 days. news.nextapple.com