Taiwan's Central Election Commission suffered a data breach exposing the national ID numbers of over 1,500 local election candidates, which is bad news for election security and for the candidates affected, including Taipei mayor Jiang Wan-an and his challenger Puma Shen.

Digital ministry officials said an outside contractor set up the filtering system badly, so files meant to stay hidden leaked ID numbers in scrambled form. The election commission says the numbers were not visible on the public search page itself, but the contractor loaded them into a non-public file by mistake.

Investigators are still digging into how it happened and how many people's data was exposed, and the case will be handled under personal data protection law.

This comes as Taiwan heads into the final stretch of its local elections, with races like the tight Taipei mayoral contest between Jiang and Shen already drawing heavy scrutiny.

Outlook: Expect a formal investigation report and possible penalties for the contractor, with election security likely to stay a hot topic through voting day.