The Control Yuan on Friday last week urged the Ministry of Civil Service to tighten Internet security after an investigation into how the personal information of civil servants was leaked online.
The Control Yuan said in a report that the leak began in June 2012, but was not discovered until last year.
The leak included data of people working in central and local governments that were submitted from 2005 to 2012, and affected up to 240,000 people, or 70.77 percent of all civil servants employed in 2012, the report said.
Photo: Taipei Times
While the ministry had said that most of the people affected by the leak were not in the military, the report said that whether documents held sensitive information was not dependent on a civil servant being in the military or not.
The personal information of more than 2,000 people working for the Investigation Bureau and its subordinate units was compromised, the report said.
The effect of such a breach on national security is incalculable, the report said.
Much of the equipment involved in the leak has already been written off, the report said.
The Investigation Bureau, the National Center for Cyber Security Technology and the Criminal Investigation Bureau agreed that even with modern technology, it would be difficult to recreate the process leading to the breach, it said.
As an A-level security information unit, the failure of the ministry to comply with government endeavors to tighten information security, as well as its delayed inclusion of civil service data under the Internet Security Management System, placed the personal information of civil servants at risk, the report said.
The report said that the ministry being classed as “medium” security was an overestimation, which the center concurred with.
It called on the ministry to initiate changes, foster in-house information security personnel instead of relying on subcontractors and more strictly adhere to the Internet Security Management System.
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