A security flaw in Passport Canada's website has allowed easy access to the personal information - including social insurance numbers, dates of birth and driver's licence numbers - of people applying for new passports.
The breach was discovered last week by an Ontario man completing his own passport application. He found he could easily view the applications of others by altering one character in the Internet address displayed by his Web browser.
"I was expecting the site to tell me that I couldn't do that," said Jamie Laning of Huntsville. "I'm just curious about these things so I tried it, and boom, there was somebody else's name and somebody else's data."
That data included social insurance numbers, driver's licence numbers and addresses.
Also available were home and business phone numbers, a federal ID card number and even a firearms licence number.
"This is exactly how identity theft happens," said Carlisle Adams, an Internet data security expert and professor at the University of Ottawa. "If you want to take out a mortgage, for example, this is the type of information the bank is going to ask for to make sure you're really the person you're claiming to be. Then all of a sudden there's a mortgage in someone else's name."
Mr. Laning, 47, an IT worker at Algonquin Automotive, informed Passport Canada of the breach last week and the passport application site was suspended through yesterday morning.
Passport Canada spokesman Fabien Lengelle acknowledged that a security breach occurred but said that it was repaired on Friday. Yesterday's closing of the website was caused by "problems of a different nature," he said
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20071204.wpassport1204/BNStory/National/?cid=al_gam_nletter_newsUp
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