IT Company Linked To Leak Of Labour Party’s List Of 330,000 Voters Works With Malta’s Local Councils And Cabinet Member’s Personal Website
A local IT company linked to a data breach of what is believed to be a Labour Party list of over 330,000 voters in the 2013 general election has also lent its hand to local councils and a cabinet member’s personal website.
According to publicly available information, C-Planet IT Solutions Ltd provides a host of IT services to several local councils across the island including:
Valletta, Sliema, St Paul’s Bay, Qormi, Naxxar, Bormla, Mdina, Isla, Birgu, Ta’ Xbiex, Marsaxlokk, Marsaskala, Birzebbugia, Floriana, and Santa Venera.
The company is owned by Philip Farrugia, a former production director at One Productions, the media wing of the Labour party. His brother-in-law is Parliamentary Secretary for European Funds Stefan Zrinzo Azzopardi, himself a former president of the Labour Party.
C-Planet has developed Zrinzo Azzopardi’s website, which includes regular blog posts that people can subscribe to and a contact page that ask for people’s details. They also provide services to Zrino Azzopardi’s law firm SZA Advocates.
The company’s most recent government contract was a direct order from ARMS Ltd on 17th October 2019. It remains to be seen how it had access to this database in the first place
Times of Malta has since quoted Labour Party sources saying that the leak emerged from a Labour Party list showing the voting preferences of the population from the 2013 general election.
Each entry includes a ‘1’ to indicate a Labour Party voter and a ‘2’ a Nationalist Party voter.
Screenshots from Data Leak also showing '1' and '2' preference
The leak, first revealed by a Twitter account called ‘Under The Breach’ yesterday, has compromised the personal data of 337,384 Maltese citizens. Details like the names, ID numbers, addresses, phone numbers and dates of birth of Maltese citizens were available at the push of a button.
The administrator of ‘Under The Breach’ explained to Lovin Malta that the data wasn’t hacked, but rather the IT company had left its server open, meaning anyone could just type in their IP address and access all their files.
The company has declined to give comments on the case after the Data Protection Commission opened up an investigation. However, they previously told The Times of Malta that the incident was a “mishap” and that the data was “old”.
Activist group Repubblika has since called on the police commissioner to open up an investigation into the issue.
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