Report: National Service Secretariat in massive data breach affecting over 600K people

Ghana’s National Service Secretariat has been hit in a massive data breach exposing personal details of over 600,000 people in the country to fraud, hacking, and identity theft.

The NSS is a government program managing a mandatory year of public service for graduates of certain educational institutions in Ghana. Every year, thousands of students join the program from across the country to work in various public sectors, including healthcare.

According to a report published by VPNmentor on 20th December 2021, the National Service Secretariat (NSS) was using Amazon Web Services to store over 3 million files from its programs. Despite password protecting some of the files in its cloud storage account, simple oversights by whoever created the account on the S3 bucket made this insufficient, and many files were still exposed.

As a result, up to 700,000 people from across Ghana were exposed to fraud, hacking, and identity theft – not to mention the dangers posed to the institutions they were working at and the Ghanaian government itself.

Read The Full Report Here

Source: vpnmentor.com