Over 250 million identity records have been exposed in what appears to have been a massive data leak spanning seven countries: Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Mexico, South Africa, and Canada.
As reported by Cyber News, as “citizens from at least seven countries” – the leak is reputedly associated with three misconfigured servers hosted on IP addresses in Brazil and the UAE, containing detailed personal information that resembled government-level identity profiles. The exposed data included ID numbers, dates of birth, contact details, home addresses, and other sensitive information.
The largest numbers of records exposed per country are roughly:
- Turkey: 88.4 million
- Egypt: 77.7 million
- South Africa: 44.5 million
- Saudi Arabia: 26.8 million
- Canada: 9.3 million
- Mexico: 8.7 million
- UAE: 4.9 million
The breach is considered particularly severe for Turkey, Egypt, and South Africa, where the databases contained full-spectrum identity details. Experts warn that such exposure places millions at risk of identity theft, financial fraud, impersonation, targeted phishing, and social engineering attacks. The servers have been taken offline after the exposure was discovered, but the damage and risk persist for the affected individuals.
The exact entity responsible for the servers or the original source of the data remains unknown. The scale and geographic diversity of this leak highlights however, how significant vulnerabilities in data storage and cybersecurity practices can put your valuable data at risk no matter where you are in the world. This situation underscores the urgent calls for stronger data protection laws and international cooperation on cybersecurity standards.
This incident is one of the largest known identity data leaks as of 2025, affecting a quarter of a billion people globally and spanning multiple continents, with long-lasting implications for data security and privacy worldwide.
Prevention through Practice
It may be too late for these records, but the Pretectum Customer Master Data Management (CMDM) platform does offer a comprehensive capability for minimizing the likelihood of incidents like this and other massive identity data breaches for organizations that adopt and implement use of it.
Some of the key traits include strong encryption of data at rest and in transit to prevent unauthorized data access, ensuring that leaked data is unreadable without decryption keys; granular access controls using a least permission model, allowing only authorized personnel access to sensitive identity data, verified by domain-associated emails and secure tokens.
Operationally, data quality is enforced through business rules, reducing errors and inconsistencies that could create vulnerabilities exploitable by attackers and detailed audit trails and change logging track who accessed or modified data, helping detect suspicious activity early and enabling fast incident investigation.
As a cloud-native SaaS platform with continuous security updates Pretectum takes care of keeping defenses current against evolving threats, and consumer self-service data verification, allows customers to directly review and update their own data, improving accuracy and trust while reducing manual errors attackers could exploit. Combine this with Data Consent Management and your organization is helped in managing customer permissions efficiently, reducing compliance risks and meeting privacy regulations.
Together, these capabilities form a strong defense and management solution for customer master data, mitigating the risk and damage of data breaches and improving overall data security and governance for organizations storing sensitive identity information.
Pretectum CMDM could help your organization in preventing data leaks, detecting incidents early, maintaining compliance, and empowering consumers in managing their personal data — all crucial countermeasures to incidents like this recent massive leak spanning several countries. #LoyaltyIsUpForGrabs