Massive Data Leak – 1.2 Billion People Personal & Social Information That Consist of 4TB Data Exposed Online
November 25, 2019 Share

Massive Data Leak – 1.2 Billion People Personal & Social Information That Consist of 4TB Data Exposed Online

1.2 Billion

Security researchers found an open Elasticsearch server that contains unique data sets of more than 1.2 billion users. The data found to associated with 2 different data enrichment companies.

The data enrichment is a process of enhancing the data of the user profile by adding new data points of information.

The elastic server containing the social and personal information of the user is not protected with password or authentication. Anyone can access and download the data by browsing to http://35(.)199(.)58(.)125:9200.

Security researchers Bob Diachenko and Vinny Troia discovered the open Elasticsearch server which has “4 billion user accounts spanning more than 4 terabytes of data.”

The data is unique and it contains details such as names, email addresses, phone numbers, Linkedin and Facebook profile information.

Researchers shared a screenshot shows the indexes of the database discovered and they are labeled to be associated with “PDL” and “OXY”. This marked as the largest data leak from a single source in organization history.

Database index

Researchers tested 50 user records, the records include any education histories and includes only multiple email addresses and multiple phone numbers.

The data found to be originated from two Data Enrichment companies People Data Labs and OxyData.

Analysis with the “Oxy” database revealed that the data sets contain almost complete scrape of LinkedIn data, including recruiter details. Researchers contacted OxyData, and they informed: “that the server did not belong to them.”

Researchers not able to attribute the database to any specific company, they believe the data belong to the customer of both the companies.

“Because of obvious privacy concerns, cloud providers will not share any information on their customers, making this a dead end. Agencies like the FBI can request this information through the legal process, but they have no authority to force the identified organization to disclose the breach.”

This post Massive Data Leak – 1.2 Billion People Personal & Social Information That Consist of 4TB Data Exposed Online originally appeared on GB Hackers.

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