A Hacker Put 75% of Kazakhstan on Sale for 0.5 Bitcoin
Digital transformation at its finest: when an entire nation gets digitized straight onto a dark web bargain bin for the price of a used family sedan.
A darknet vendor operating under the handle shymzz13 listed a 2.7-gigabyte database allegedly extracted from the state services portal eGov, exposing the sensitive records of roughly 15 million citizens—amounting to three-quarters of the entire population of Kazakhstan.
The asking price for the dump was set at a humble 0.5 Bitcoin (around $32,000), effectively valuing an individual citizen's private life at mere fractions of a cent. Inside the compressed archive, buyers found 47 million lines of records containing passport numbers, phone numbers, email addresses, employers, scanned identity documents, and raw passwords.
With unencrypted document scans and credentials now circulating freely, fraudulent loan applications, targeted social engineering calls, and direct takeovers of online banking accounts have been streamlined into ready-made attack kits.
Centralizing every aspect of citizen life into a single government database remains the ultimate modern efficiency dream, right until an administrator is reminded that a single master lock provides a single master key for the lowest bidder.
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