Rogue employees sell on World Cup fans' passport data

September 2010 Information Security

Reports are coming in that the Information Commissioner's Office has started investigating FIFA, the world football governing body, over allegations that details of thousands of World Cup fans' data - including their passport data - were accessed by one or more members of staff and then sold on the black market.

According to Imperva, the data security specialist, it is alleged that the details of more than 35 000 English fans - who visited Germany for the 2006 World Cup - had their passport and allied data sold to ticket touts for marketing purposes.

"Although this was clearly illegal, it also calls into question the internal security practices within football's international governing body whose IT managers really should know better," said Amichai Shulman, Imperva's chief technology officer. "It confirms something we have been saying for some time, namely that most organisations defend their digital assets against external attack, but they ignore the internal threat at their peril."

According to Shulman, this serious breach of trust could have been avoided if FIFA had monitored - and secured - the access to football fans personal data by their staff, as well as the association's files and databases. By allowing only carefully controlled access to data, the rogue member of staff would have realised s/he could not get away with accessing the information in the first place. The employees did not hack into the database; it was an internal attack where they abused normal functionality and privileges granted to them. This was probably a case of over privileged users as these low level employees probably should not have been granted access to that data in the first place.”

However, one thing to question is how this four year old data was still on the databases?

Shulman comments “The data that was sold was fan data from 2006 which was used for the 2010 games. There are two scenarios that could have occurred:

1. The data was stolen in 2006, stored locally and then when the time came the insider put it on the market. The employee knew already in 2006 that he was sitting on a goldmine given the football fans are lifetime fans and in four years time this data will be of extreme value.

2. The other option, which I actually believe is probably the case – the data was retained in the databases from 2006 and accessed by employees in 2010.

The question then is why is the data – including passport details – stored in the databases for so long? If the data was being stored for the specific company for statistics/ analysis/anticipation of participation etc, then why did they feel it necessary to store the real personal details such as passport details? It very much seems that controls on the database were completely inadequate.”

“A lot of organisations forget about what data is stored in their systems, especially from four years ago. The ticketing agency may not even have been aware that they had a database containing this data. However, according to international law governing the exchange of information, the data should have been deleted. This is a problem many enterprises face – they do not know where to begin, where all the sensitive data that is stored, what should be kept and what needs to be deleted.” adds Shulman.

“Furthermore, I would assume that there is a large turnover of ticketing agency employees in four years – can every single employee since then up until now have gained access to this data? What about passwords? Were they even changed during this time period? And a very important question – who has access to the data. Did every employee have access rights to the sensitive data?”

Shulman commented, “A database access monitoring system that looks at the rate at which data is taken out of the database would have detected this problem but it is not enough to have a simple monitoring solution because the access to the database is usually through an application so you need to be able to maintain end to end visibility through all the different tiers. The system should alert on any abnormal amount of data retrieved from the database and also apply geo-location analysis and alert on an illogical access to database by a user who should not be accessing the data so many times or retrieving a large number of details in a single session.”

The reason you need end-to-end visibility is because users connect to a database via an application, the application accesses the database through a pool of connections using a single account. If you only monitor the traffic between application and database server you see a single account making all the access requests so you cannot distinguish between individual application users and cannot say whether this number of records accessed is acceptable, so you need to maintain end to end accountability.

For more on the FIFA data security blunder: http://bit.ly/bsLd8R





Share this article:
Share via emailShare via LinkedInPrint this page



Further reading:

Highest increase in global cyberattacks in two years
Information Security News & Events
Check Point Global Research released new data on Q2 2024 cyber-attack trends, noting a 30% global increase in Q2 2024, with Africa experiencing the highest average weekly per organisation.

Read more...
Upgrade your PCs to improve security
Information Security Infrastructure
Truly secure technology today must be designed to detect and address unusual activity as it happens, wherever it happens, right down to the BIOS and silicon levels.

Read more...
Open source code can also be open risk
Information Security Infrastructure
Software development has changed significantly over the years, and today, open-source code increasingly forms the foundation of modern applications, with surveys indicating that 60 – 90% of the average application's code base consists of open-source components.

Read more...
DeepSneak deception
Information Security News & Events
Kaspersky Global Research & Analysis researchers have discovered a new malicious campaign which is distributing a Trojan through a fake DeepSeek-R1 Large Language Model (LLM) app for PCs.

Read more...
SA’s strained, loadshedding-prone grid faces cyberthreats
Power Management Information Security
South Africa’s energy sector, already battered by decades of underinvestment and loadshedding, faces another escalating crisis; a wave of cyberthreats that could turn disruptions into catastrophic failures. Attacks are already happening internationally.

Read more...
Almost 50% of companies choose to pay the ransom
News & Events Information Security
This year’s Sophos State of Ransomware 2025 report found that nearly 50% of companies paid the ransom to get their data back, the second-highest rate of ransom payment for ransom demands in six years.

Read more...
Survey highlights cost of cyberdamage to industrial companies
Kaspersky Information Security News & Events
The majority of industrial organisations estimate their financial losses caused by cyberattacks to be over $1 million, while almost one in four report losses exceeding $5 million, and for some, it surpasses $10 million.

Read more...
Digital economy needs an agile approach to cybersecurity
Information Security News & Events
South Africa is the most targeted country in Africa when it comes to infostealer and ransomware attacks. Being at the forefront of the continent’s digital transformation puts South Africa in the crosshairs for sophisticated cyberattacks

Read more...
SIEM rule threat coverage validation
Information Security News & Events
New AI-detection engineering assistant from Cymulate automates SIEM rule validation for SecOps and blue teams by streamlining threat detection engineering with automated testing, control integrations and enhanced detections.

Read more...
Cybersecurity a challenge in digitalising OT
Kaspersky Information Security Industrial (Industry)
According to a study by Kaspersky and VDC Research on securing operational technology environments, the primary risks are inadequate security measures, insufficient resources allocated to OT cybersecurity, challenges surrounding regulatory compliance, and the complexities of IT/OT integration.

Read more...










While every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the information contained herein, the publisher and its agents cannot be held responsible for any errors contained, or any loss incurred as a result. Articles published do not necessarily reflect the views of the publishers. The editor reserves the right to alter or cut copy. Articles submitted are deemed to have been cleared for publication. Advertisements and company contact details are published as provided by the advertiser. Technews Publishing (Pty) Ltd cannot be held responsible for the accuracy or veracity of supplied material.




© Technews Publishing (Pty) Ltd. | All Rights Reserved.