Russian voters are also faced with the leakage of their personal data. At the beginning of July 2020, according to Medusa, the passport data of all participants of the electronic voting on amendments to the Constitution, without exception, were leaked to the Network.
Passport data at all polling stations during the voting on amendments were checked using specialized software.
This was done to exclude the possibility of repeated voting on those passports that were already used when registering for electronic voting.
This program was publicly available on the server of one of the government agencies – it was placed in a password-protected ZIP archive. However, the password to it was received by all election commissions, besides it could be easily picked up.
After downloading and hacking the archive, the user received not only the program itself, but also a local database with passport series and numbers. The database was poorly encrypted, and it was not difficult to crack it, as well as the archive with the program. “As a result, we had 1,190,726 records with passport data. Exactly as many voters, according to the authorities, have signed up for remote electronic voting,” Medusa employees said.