Personal data of 41 of the 225 members of the Senate and House of Representatives (18%) circulate on the dark web.
Until this one worrying conclusion come Proton and Constella Intelligence. They investigated the digital vulnerability of European politicians and published their findings today.
Using the email addresses of parliamentarians and senators, they searched dark marketplaces for passwords, for example. Of these, 35 are going around. Furthermore, personal data can be traced back, such as dates of birth, home or work addresses and IP addresses.
In itself, not all of this data poses a threat. However, their combination makes carrying out identity theft or impersonalization easier.
This type of personal data has often previously been obtained from data leaks at providers such as Adobe, Dailymotion, Dropbox and LinkedIn. Interested parties can check these types of leaks for themselves, for example Have I been Pwnd.
Proton and Constella Intelligence also investigated politics from other European countries. This shows that the Netherlands does not even score very unfavorably with eighteen percent ‘leakage’. The weighted EU average is 44 percent.
The parties keep to themselves who the most vulnerable Dutch politicians are.
The researchers recommend that politicians and self-conscious netizens work with email aliases, password managers and dark web monitoring services.
Photo: Chad Cooper (cc)
Source: www.emerce.nl
