Military equipment containing biometric data of soldiers is mistakenly sold on eBay

A batch of old US military equipment was sold through eBay, while it still had the biometric data of soldiers, terrorists and people who worked for the army in Afghanistan and other countries in the Middle East.

According to information published by The New York Times, information that included fingerprints, iris scans, images and descriptions of thousands of people who ended up in the hands of a team of computer experts who reported their findings via an online blog. Despite the importance of information that could be considered confidential, the hackers claimed that it was “boring”.

This is because everything this information was stored on devices without encryption and protected by a predetermined password, which was not a serious problem for them.

Matthias Marx, a cybersecurity expert, finds it surprising that these people could have had access to this batch of military hardware. Added to this is the fact that an investigation into how the army processes this type of information raises some doubts about the levels of security that apply in these cases.

This is even more important because There are reports that after US troops left Afghanistan, the Taliban managed to get their hands on some of these biometric devices.. The problem is that they can be used to identify people who helped US forces while in the country.

This is something the government is aware of, as some officials have pointed out in the past that these databases could be blacklisted in the wrong hands.

In total, computer scientists managed to buy 6 biometric devices.. Of these, two contained confidential information on memory cards of at least 2632 people. They estimate that the information in said report was compiled around 2012.

The New York Times reports that the company that sold the equipment on eBay had previously purchased it at auction and was unaware it still contained sensitive information.