ViewFines

For the past 5 years, South Africa has experienced some notable and rather concerning data breaches and leaks. More concerning is also that none of the businesses or organizations have been officially investigated or suffered any punishment.

Information Regulator (South Africa) has concluded investigation into the Viewfines data leak which saw 1 million personal records of South Africans leaked online.

South African consumers aren't confident that organisations always use their information lawfully and for agreed purposes.

For three consecutive years we, iAfrikan, have broken stories about major data breaches and leaks across Afrika. Some, we've reported on publicly, while others were too sensitive and we simply notified the relevant authorities without publicly reporting on them. These include in 2016, the data leak of Kenya's KCB Bank

On 24 May 2018 we revealed and reported on how ViewFines, an online traffic fines payments website for South Africans, was the source of the leak of 934,000 personal records of South Africans. This came after its owner, Stephen Birkholtz, admitted to iAfrikan that they did indeed briefly "

In a conversation with iAfrikan last week, ViewFines' Stephen Birkholtz stated that it was their database that was leaked. This came after an iAfrikan investigation, in collaboration with security consultant, Troy Hunt, revealed and confirmed independently that it was indeed ViewFines' user database that was leaked. Added to this, Birkholtz

We have been able to confirm that South African traffic fines online payments website, ViewFines, is the source of the data leak of personal records of 934,000 South African drivers. Troy Hunt, an Australian security consultant and founder of haveibeenpwned who worked with iAfrikan in looking into the data