: The site originally hosting the data featured messages mocking the Turkish government's technical infrastructure and political leadership. Content and Security Risks
: Government officials later claimed the leaked data was "an old story" from 2010, allegedly stolen by staff members who sold physical copies on DVDs.
The MERNİS project was originally designed as a centralized database to streamline government services using unique personal identification numbers. The leak’s origins are complex:
Technically, a .tar.gz file (or "tarball") is a compressed archive commonly used in Linux and Unix-based systems to bundle multiple files into a single, smaller package. However, in the context of "mernis.tar.gz," it represents a massive cache of sensitive data—including full names, Turkish ID numbers (TC Kimlik No), dates of birth, and home addresses—that has circulated online since at least 2016. The History of the MERNİS Leak
The "mernis.tar.gz" file typically contains a large SQL database file ( mernis.sql ). Its exposure poses severe long-term risks: mernis.sql.tar.gz - ekşi sözlük
: In early 2016, the data became widely available via peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing services in a file roughly 1.5 GB to 6.6 GB in size (depending on compression).
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