Updated A trove of leaked information, purported to be the entire Turkish citizenship database, has been leaked.

The leaked info appears to contain names, addresses and ID numbers of more than 49 million citizens. If confirmed, the leak would become one of the biggest privacy breaches, by number of records, ever.

Although billed as a Turkish citizenship database there are doubts about that and it seems more likely that we’re looking at a residency database put together for the police and other law enforcement agencies, and already leaked, perhaps multiple times.

If this is really what it claims, I think it is one of the largest security/PII breaches since the #OPM hack: https://t.co/xyFRTf2hHD — Jacob Appelbaum (@ioerror) April 4, 2016

The leaked info weighs in at 6.6GB uncompressed and is searchable.

Those behind the leak imply that it was politically motivated, aimed against Turkey’s controversial president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

The purportedly leaked data is online at http://185.100.87.84/ and El Reg advises readers to tread with care before downloading the torrent linked from that page. On the page is what appears to be some of President Erdoğan's personal information, along with that of his predecessor, Abdullah Gül, and the current prime minister of Turkey, Ahmet Davutoğlu.

A statement at the top of the data leak page says:

Who would have imagined that backwards ideologies, cronyism and rising religious extremism in Turkey would lead to a crumbling and vulnerable technical infrastructure?

Turkey’s population is 79 million, according to a 2015 census. ®