Singapore's Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (Acra) faced public scrutiny after a new Bizfile platform inadvertently revealed full NRIC numbers of registered individuals. Indranee Rajah, Second Minister for Finance, revealed that over 500,000 searches were conducted during a five-day period when the feature was active.
Over 500,000 searches were made on Bizfile during the five-day period when Acra unmasked the NRIC numbers of individuals registered on the platform.This figure is much higher than the usual daily traffic of 2,000 to 3,000 queries, said Second Minister for Finance Indranee Rajah on Wednesday (Jan 8). Most of these queries were made on Dec 13, a day after news of the new Bizfile platform broke, she said.
In a ministerial statement during Wednesday's Parliament sitting, Indranee addressed questions filed by MPs on the disclosure of NRIC numbers on Acra's Bizfile platform. On Dec 9, Acra launched its new Bizfile platform, which had a search function which produced people's full NRIC numbers with their names. The People Search function was disabled on Dec 13 night, after the public raised concerns about the implications of unmasking NRIC numbers. Acra resumed the service on Dec 28, which no longer shows individuals' NRIC numbers, masked or unmasked. Investigations so far show that these searches came from about 28,000 IP address, most of which were from Singapore. The authorities, however, were not able to identify the exact number of NRIC numbers that were disclosed, she said. This is because the Bizfile portal is unable to track individual queries for the People Search function. Acra and GovTech also conducted a security review and did not uncover any known threat actors from the IP addresses that were used to make enquiries on the Bizfile platform during the five-day period. Indranee reiterated that Acra's database does not contain information on all Singapore citizens — only those who are involved in Acra-registered entitie
SINGAPORE ACRA BIZFILE NRIC DATA BREACH
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