Leakage: SSS yet to remove staff records from Internet

Two weeks after a list containing the private data of 60 serving and former State Security Service agents found its way to the Internet, the names, addresses and next-of-kin of the operatives are yet to be completely removed from the web.

The list was left in the comments section of the website of a Nigerian online news medium on August 12. The list also contains the addresses, professions, phone numbers, dates of birth and other details of the agents and their wives, children and other family members.

The PUNCH’s findings on Sunday showed that the original story that attracted the comment had been deleted and the comment removed. A search on the news website where the list was originally posted returned a message that said, “Page not available. The requested URL was not found on this server.”

However, when The PUNCH ran a check on the Internet using two of the names of the compromised agents as keywords, the list of the agents, and their contact details, were found in the cache of the news website.

In an article for the online resource site, About.com, an expert-writer, Paul Gil, defines a cache as a “specialised form of computer memory.”