Personal information on 6 million citizens has been stolen from Chilean government and military servers, in a stunt to highlight the worrying state of data protection in the country, reports claim.

Confidential details on six million people have been stolen from government servers in Chile and published on the internet, local reports claim.

The hacker broke into both government and military servers and copied the individuals' ID card numbers, addresses, telephone numbers and academic records into a technology blog, according to El Mercurio, one of Chile's oldest newspapers.

The hacker left a message saying the aim of the breach was to demonstrate how poor data protection is in Chile. Site administrators quickly removed the hacker's post and contacted police.

Police commissioner Jaime Jara said an investigation into the incident was already underway.