It took only a few days before the big glitches happened.
Despite a seemingly positive start to Thailand’s vaccine campaign, a website designed for foreign nationals to register for vaccinations late last week began coughing up their private data, putting scrutiny back on officials who may have been hoping fast jabs would soothe sore spirits.
As recently as last Friday, the website launched to accommodate vaccine registration for foreign nationals, www.thailandintervac.com, was found to be revealing the names, passport numbers and resident provinces of people who registered via the website.
Thai officials have yet to release a statement in response to the data breach. Calls to the Ministry of Public Health on Monday afternoon went unanswered.
The breach did not require expert hacking. On Friday evening, a member of Coconuts Media using the website first discovered the breach by stumbling upon the URL www.thailandintervac.com/profile-summary.php. Every time the page was refreshed, a different foreign national’s information would be revealed.
That page was soon taken offline and made unavailable over the weekend.
As of Monday afternoon, the website was no longer available — notably a few minutes after expat blogger Richard Barrow called out the incident on his Twitter account.
Although most netizens slammed it as an example of official negligence, some pointed out that the breach may have gone even further than Barrow had reported. Twitter user @IAmKohChang, founder of the popular travel website www.iamkohchang.com, suggested he was able to access the entire database of foreign profiles.
Just before the site went offline, I found a URL that will let you see all profiles. Just need to change a variable ?q=A12345 etc at the end of it.
— Ian (@iamKohChang) June 14, 2021
Last week, Thai officials launched the website for foreigners living in Thailand to register for vaccines. The eligible groups initially were foreigners aged 60 and over and those who have underlying diseases including cancer, diabetes, obesity, severe chronic respiratory diseases and chronic kidney diseases.
Registration was later quietly, and perhaps unofficially, opened to all foreign nationals over 18 via www.thailandintervac.com/expatriates.
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