Turkish app 'Quran Kuran' data breached, over 3.6 Muslims at risk

A data breach involving the Turkish app "Quran Kuran" has feared to have leaked over 3.6 million sensitive records, putting millions of Muslims at risk of unauthorized surveillance and privacy breaches

A data breach involving the Turkish app "Quran Kuran" has feared to have leaked over 3.6 million sensitive records, putting millions of Muslims at risk of unauthorized surveillance and privacy breaches.

The Turkish app “QuranKuran” data leak was first noticed by the Cybernews research team on August 15 this year when it discovered an unprotected Elasticsearch server exposing more than 3.6 million extremely sensitive data records to anyone on the internet.

The leaked data was later found to be linked to popular Quran Kuran app, downloaded over 1 million times from the Google Play Store.

"Highly sensitive information"

Quran Kuran app has been developed by Sigma Telecom, an Istanbul-based telecommunications company. The app helps users study, read, and learn Quran, the Muslim holy book, while also providing guidelines about prayer timing and practices.

“The exposed data contained detailed personal and technical information, making it highly sensitive and possible to exploit in multiple scenarios. Malicious actors could utilize leaked information for identity theft and other forms of cyber fraud”, Cybernews reported Thursday.

The Quran app data breach included highly sensitive information, such as Geodata and location, device and network identifiers, MAC addresses (unique 12-digit hexadecimal codes for devices), IP addresses of the subscribers, SIM serial numbers, carrier details and application-specific information, the cybersecurity and tech news portal said.

This is not the first time when the Muslims have been put at risk due to data collected by prayer apps. The US federal government had in 2020 purchased cellphone location data collected from popular prayer apps used by millions of Muslims worldwide, according to reports.

“Harvesting of data on Muslim app users worldwide is a serious threat to privacy and religious freedom,” said the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) at the time.

Follow ummid.com WhatsApp Channel for all the latest updates.

Select Language To Read in Urdu, Hindi, Marathi or Arabic.