Questions about the Massive South African “Master Deeds” Data Breach Answered
The mystery of there being more ID numbers in the breach than people in SA could be explained if they were being used in the database as a generated primary key, and since the remaining columns are nullable, they could filled in with data from various sources as it is sucked in. The fact that New_IDn [1] is an bigint leads me to strongly suspect this, since most developers in SA would treat ID numbers as strings, rather than numbers, unless they had a very good reason to do otherwise.<p>It would be pretty easy to figure this out by stripping out the last 3 digits from the ID numbers in the DB, and then ordering them by the first 6 (DOB) digits. Assuming that digits 7-10 are allocated to males and females sequentially in their respective ranges, there should be much sparser data for higher numbers in digits 7-10 (say, above 5500 for males and 0500 for females) [2], since those people wouldn&#x27;t exist.<p>As for the source of the data, I have never owned property, but my email was in the breach, so the Deeds Office isn&#x27;t the (only?) source of the data. I also doubt that the Deeds Office even records email addresses.<p>If would strongly suspect a credit bureau or two, since they track historic address data, emails and employers. I have my credit reports that have slightly incorrect address data from SA credit bureaus, and it would be interesting to see if it matches the data in the DB. My wife, mother, and children don&#x27;t have credit records of any significance, and none of their emails came up in the breach, and my father and I, who do, had our emails exposed, according to haveibeenpwned.<p>[1]New_IDn is the column name because the original ID numbers tracked race in Digit &quot;A&quot;, and this fell away as apartheid was dismantled, so people born before around 1990 had their original ID numbers reissued, and position A now has an &quot;8&quot; for everyone.<p>[2]A good upper bound guess would be to look at the number of births in a particular year&#x2F;365&#x2F;2 (for each sex)