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Iraq’s Planning Ministry says the claims which many people are making online that cybercriminals leaked national census data & wants to sell them on the dark web marketplaces.
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Officials said the database holding the census data has an offline protection coming from a standalone network system that has no connection to the internet.
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The ministry shared the rigorous details of how they cleaned up and sanitized the tablets that the workers used during the process to show it is not possible for anyone to recover the information.
Iraq’s Ministry of Planning has come out strongly to debunk the claims that criminals leaked sensitive national census data and plans to sell it on the dark web. The minister called the allegations “false and misleading.”
The ministry released an official statement after many people already spread the reports on social media. The idea was that all the people’s personal information which the government collected during its recent population census has landed into the hands of criminals.
But according to what the officials said, the data is very safe. And this is because the government used high level security protocol & storage methods to keep it safe.
From the description, the country stored people’s data in a network that is on its own and has no link to the internet. This means no criminal can not access it through the internet.
The denial follows the panic from the public over digital security and privacy after Iraq completed its first full national census after almost 4 decades.
There are No Bases for the Claims Iraq Minister
In a formal statement, on Tuesday, April 14, the ministry said that the allegations people are making online are “baseless rumors” . He further said clearly that cybercriminals didn’t breach the census database at all.
Further the officials said they believed that a group of people who started the claims had the intention to create public confusion & make people doubt the process which they followed to conduct the national census process.
In the statement, the ministry’s spokesperson reiterated that Iraq kept the census record under “high-level technical & cyber protection” & because of the architecture of the data system, no criminals can hack it remotely and achieve success.
This is because the data sits in a local network completely off from the global internet, an approach which engineers call “air-gapping.”
How Iraq Protected Census Information
To reassure the public, officials shared an explanation of all the procedures they followed to ensure security to the data when conducting the census and after the entire process.
The ministry said over 125,000 census workers used tablets when they were doing the nationwide population count. But after the process ended, they put the whole devices under a very strict sanitization process which specialized technical teams carried out.
They removed the memory of the tablets and kept formatting and wiping repeatedly until they restored the tablets to the factory sweating they came with before the count.
Officials also revealed that the team of technical experts confirmed that the data was no longer available in the devices and no one can recover them. As a result of all these, the ministry said that these floating concerns that bad actors can recover the data have no basis.
This 2026 census is the most recent one because it was in 1987 that Iraq did something like it. So the country sees this as something great that has happened after all these years of many issues.
Notably, the Iraq government depended on digital technology, GIS mapping, & tablets when collecting data all in the bid to make the operation more modern and ensure the statistics they gathered are accurate.
The final census showed that Iraq’s population sits at approximately 46.1 million people.
Political Sensitivity Surrounding Census Data
The controversy over this leak comes from the tensions around Iraq’s census results, which have caused debates to start over how the distribution of the population is and how the government handles regional representation.
Census figures in Iraq have some notable implications regarding how the allocation will flow in the federal budget, infrastructure planning, parliamentary representation, & regional resource distribution.
In recent months, there were disputes on the population share of the Kurdistan Region & Kurdish officials are already alleging census manipulation. Due to the importance of the census data both politically & financially, any information that data tampering or leakage happened, there might be serious misunderstandings.
Such false reports, according to analysts, might reduce the trust which the people have about the census & lead to more disputes between Baghdad & regional authorities.
In conclusion the ministry implored the citizens & media outlets to only believe the announcements from the government & avoid spreading claims they haven’t verified.
The importance of verifying cyber attack claims is underscored by real incidents like French authorities recently arrested a man for an alleged cyber attack on the interior ministry, a case where the threat was real and led to an arrest, unlike the false census breach rumors in Iraq.
