Security Breach At Passport Canada Site Allows Access To Applicants’ Info
Posted December 4, 2007 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
It didn’t take much – only a few keystrokes – for a Huntsville, Ontario man filling out an online passport application on the Passport Canada website to access the personal information of other applicants according to a published report.
The apparent security breach on the federal government website was discovered by 47-year-old IT worker Jamie Laning last week. Laning discovered that by changing a character in the Internet address he could see other people’s applications – including their social insurance numbers, addresses, phone numbers and driver’s licences.
He informed Passport Canada of the problem and they shut down the site to traffic last week. An agency spokesperson conceded there’d been a security breach.
The site was accessible again Monday following a separate problem, but according to the report it was still possible to access names, addresses and contact information for passport applicants.
Unlike in the U.S., where many states require organizations to acknowledge that they’ve suffered a security breach within a certain amount of time, at this point there’s no such law in Canada.
