In September this year when Equifax servers were hacked it allowed attackers to steal personal details of more than 143 million Americans – That was over 40% of the entire population of the United States. Now, the Cyber Risk Team at UpGuard have discovered a massive trove of data belonging to households in which personal and sensitive details of 123 million Americans have been exposed online.
How Did It Happen
Apparently, the leak was possible due to misconfigured Amazon Web Services S3 cloud storage “bucket,” where the data was being stored by a California-based data analytics firm. This comes as no surprise since the previous misconfiguration in Amazon S3 Buckets had exposed confidential NSA and US military related data online.
What Was In The Data
The exposed bucket according to UpGuard’s blog post on Tuesday contained massive data sets belonging to US Census Bureau and Alteryx partner Experian, a consumer credit reporting agency and competitor to Equifax.
Researchers believe the data was purchased by Alteryx from Experian’s ConsumerView marketing database, a product sold to other enterprises and contains a mix of public details and more sensitive data.
How The Data Was Discovered
The internet is full of exposed databases and for UpGuard Director of Cyber, Risk Research Chris Vickery finding those databases seems like a piece of cake since Vickery was the one to discover 191 million US voter registration records and Mexican voter database of 93.4 million citizens.
To read the original article:
