Nathan Toohey and Alina Lobzina report:
The Vedomosti newspaper has reported that more than 1 million of mobile provider MTS’ users have had their personal data published on the Zhiltsy.net website.
A resident of the town of Ufa, Fedor Ponomarev, alerted the newspaper to the massive data leak.
The data originated from 2006 and after learning about the leak MTS tightened its data security, Vedomosti reported, adding that a source at MTS said the leak was “due to the fault of the security services.” The exact security services branch was not named.
According to Vedomosti’s estimates the database on the website contains more than 1.6 million phones numbers with the prefix codes 917 and 911, which correspond to the Bashkiria and St. Petersburg regions.
The data base contains the name, surname and patronymic of private subscribers, as well as some address and passport details.
Read more on The Moscow News.
Lukas I. Alpert also covers the breach on Moscow Times.
From available coverage, it sounds like the leak actually originally occurred in 2006 and that MTS may have known about a leak that year. But maybe I’m misunderstanding the news coverage…