Malaysia minister tells agencies to look into purported data leak involving 13 million accounts

KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia’s Communications and Digital Minister Fahmi Fadzil has tasked two agencies to look into a purported data leak involving some 13 million account holders.

The leaks allegedly contain information from satellite broadcaster Astro, the Election Commission of Malaysia as well as Maybank.

This comes after a social media user that goes by the handle @PendakwahTekno tagged the first-time minister in a tweet about the purported leaks.

In response, Mr Fahmi on Friday (Dec 30) wrote that the allegations were serious and involved a large amount of data.

“I will ask CyberSecurity Malaysia and (the Personal Data Protection Department) to investigate whether the data leak involving the various parties had really happened, and to take action according to the law,” he wrote.

In the tweet, the user wrote that there were some 13 million user information from Maybank, the Election Commission and Astro that was leaked.

In the accompanying photos to the tweet, the user showed the purported leaks include the full name, identity card number as well as contact information of those whose information had been compromised.

The user, however, was not the first person to have discovered the leak.

Threatmon, a cyber threat intelligence platform, had on Monday posted a tweet that a “threat actor on the darkweb” had shared “sensitive data from the databases of three major banks in Malaysia”.

Malay Mail reported that Malaysia has seen a number of data leak incidents earlier this year. This includes a breach of the government’s online salary system in September where cyber criminals may have allegedly stolen one million sets of personal data as well as two million salary slips.

Earlier in November, the Star reported that the data of more than 11.6 million Malaysian WhatsApp users were being sold online. The information on the database came from an earlier Facebook leak in 2019.