Personal data of clients of Moscow provider "Akado" was found in the public domain

The names, addresses and phone numbers of clients of the Moscow provider Akado can be found out by their IP addresses through the publicly available whois service (in the European registrar RIPE database ). This was written by the IT consultant of the Anti-Corruption Foundation Vladislav Zdolnikov.

According to the expert, he came across this feature of Akado 11 years ago, when the operator was still called Komkor, and now he checked their networks again “and was even more shocked – from the fact that nothing had changed in almost 11 years.”

Zdolnikov checked the arrays of IP addresses that Akado allocates to its clients for internet connection. The publicly available database records last names, first names, patronymics or company names, connection addresses and telephone numbers for these addresses. There are both individuals and companies and government agencies using Akado.

On October 12, Zdolnikov reported this to Akado, citing examples of data available without restrictions. Following an inspection on October 22, he was told that "information on whois requests was edited" and promised to remove personal data from the database.

Zdolnikov claims that as a result, only the data on the two examples he cited became unavailable. Mediazona was indeed able to see data on the other examples cited by Zdolnikov in the RIPE database.

Svetlana Belykh, head of the press service of Akado, promised to provide a response to Mediazona's request and advised the correspondent to check how things are with personal data in the databases of other companies. Mediazona did not find any personal data in the public domain in the records of Rostelecom and MGTS (respectively, the first and second operators in Moscow by number of subscribers).

Later, Akado reported that they were conducting an internal audit. "We always treat critical comments with attention and gratitude and conduct a thorough analysis of identified vulnerabilities in information systems to prevent possible data leaks," the provider's press service added.

Akado is one of the main operators in the Moscow region, with 663 thousand Internet subscribers at the end of 2017.

Updated at 17:51. Comment "Akado" added.