New Zealand shuts down gun buyback website amid fears of massive leak of law-abiding firearm owners’ data
New Zealand’s online notification platform for the firearm buy-back program has been shut down after a local gun owners association found a vulnerability that allegedly exposed the data of some 37,000 law-abiding citizens.
“We have advised the office of the Privacy Commissioner of the potential issue,” police said in a statement, sharing little additional detail and admitting they were informed of the problem by a “member of the public.”
So… 37,000 names, addresses, banking information, and a listing of firearms they own or owned were exposed for consumption by anyone who happened to look…
Way to go, NZ. That’s certainly a thing that happened, way to make already skeptical firearm owners feel secure in their persons and property.
The firearm and magazine ban in the nation hasn’t been going as swimmingly or smoothly as the supporters could have hoped. Compliance is not projected to be stellar and now with this data breach those that did comply have had their personal information exposed for exploitation by competent parties. Something that, ironically, this confiscation was supposed to prevent… just with firearms instead of fraud, theft, B&E, or other crimes capable of being committed with the breached data.
The site has been taken offline by the New Zealand government and they are looking into possible sources that could have had access to the exposed data. But since it was a “member of the public” who brought this to the attention of authorities it is unknown just how public this information has gotten.
“This is exactly what we feared of an incompetent agency in charge of an online register “
It turns out that confiscation leads to… loss of information security from the one entity who should be most careful with it, the elected.
