A security breach in an app used by Israel's ruling Likud party has exposed the personal information of nearly 6.5 million Israeli voters to hackers, a cybersecurity expert said Monday.
The source of the breach in the Elector application, designed by Israeli software company Feedback for use in campaign management, is unknown. The Privacy Protection Authority, a unit of the Justice Ministry, has launched an investigation into the incident.
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News of the data breach comes just weeks before Israelis go to the polls for the third time in under a year.
Netanyahu is seeking re-election for a fourth consecutive term as premier on March 2 after two elections in 2019 yielded inconclusive results.
The Likud acknowledged that it had "thwarted an attempt" to damage a digital platform used to recruit party supporters on election day. The party did not respond to inquiries about the data breach.
The information breach is particularly severe as it exposed the Voter Register in full, including the names, addresses, ID numbers, and polling stations of eligible Israeli voters – and in some cases their phone number, gender and whether they are registered members of the various parties.
Noam Rotem, an Israeli security researcher who first revealed the data breach on his podcast "Cyber Cyber," said he received an anonymous tip from a hacker, which he later confirmed independently.
Rotem said that while it remained uncertain whether Israelis' personal data had been exploited, "it is very likely to assume that we are not the only ones with access to this information."
"It was very easy to get the data. Anyone with a regular web browser could have done it," he told The Associated Press.
Israeli political parties receive the personal data of voters from the Central Elections Committee ahead of elections for internal campaign purposes on condition that the data remains private.
Neither Feedback nor Elector's app designer Tzur Yamin were available for comment.
