Alex Trelinski
A MAJOR cyberattack on the database of Spain’s traffic authority- the DGT- may have resulted in the hacking of information about of millions of motorists hacked.
The Guardia Civil is investigating the possible breach amidst claims that an online forum that specialises in selling material from hackers is offering a package involving 34.5 million drivers.
The El Mundo newspaper has reported that several suspicious users were detected a fortnight ago trying to gather data from the DGT database and were subsequently blocked.
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Their identities have been made available to the Guardia Civil.
The probe has not yet confirmed that hackers obtained the details of all of the drivers and it has been pointed out that the database has 27 million people on it, and not 34.5 million as mentioned in the forum.
If successful, the cybercriminals could have obtained everything from car licence plate numbers to the full names of vehicle owners as well as ID numbers and addresses plus current insurance information.
The hacking forum said: “We have access to consult any licence plate or document of the drivers and we also sell the entire database with 34.5 million names.”
The online news site El Confidencial says that the posting was made on May 13 and its not known how much the criminals want for the DGT details.
A 27-year-old Murcia man was arrested by the police in February before he was able to sell details of 40 million licence plates he had hacked from the DGT servers.
He created a special computer programme that was able to make ‘massive queries’ that generated an equal amount of responses.
Some 80,000 DGT files had been hacked via the Murcia region government website.
Police cyber experts noticed the man carried out regular intrusions into the DGT computer network via other regional portals including Andalucia, the Canary Islands, and the Balearic Islands.
The hacker did his work at a ‘low-intensity’ level for four years, building up around 40 million pieces of data on registered vehicles and their owners.
