The recent incident, in which the personal data of over 50 million Turkish citizens was stolen and put in public on a server in Romania shows that Turkey does not take sufficient measures to protect its citizens, cybersecurity expert Ozan Uçar told Sputnik Turkiye.
"The incident with the information's leak and its publication on the Internet showed two very unpleasant things. First, it turns out that these personal data in some way previously fell into the hands of hackers and the state has failed to take any action to prevent it. The second point relates to the fact that this data can be accessed by anyone," Uçar told Sputnik Turkiye.
"In banks, for example, credit card information of their customers is stored in a fragmentary state, in a special way, in encrypted systems of their own production, equipped with multi-stage protection against hacking. For example, when information on 2.7 million credit cards of one of the world famous bank was stolen, the hackers were unable to take advantage of it for their own purposes, because much of the data was stored in other systems," Uçar told Sputnik Turkiye.
In the case of the Turkish government, however, there was no reliable information storage system, he added. However, reversing the damage from the leak could be costly.
"In the long term, [Turkey should] firstly, change the ID numbers of the identity documents of Turkish citizens, and secondly, to complicate the process of using these numbers, that is, to take additional security measures when conducting transactions with these numbers," Uçar told Sputnik Turkiye.
He added that currently, Turkish citizens are asked for their national ID numbers when buying medicines at a pharmacy, or even renting a bicycle, which he does not see as a good way to protect such important data.
