Absolutely Humongous Data Breach Exposes over a Billion Records

upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for chromas.

Absolutely humongous data breach exposes more than a billion records

Well, this is certainly not great: An unprotected database of more than a billion users' records from across the internet - including "social media accounts, email addresses, and phone numbers" - was discovered on an unidentified Elasticsearch server that could be accessed by anyone with the server's web address.

What's even weirder is, according to Bloomberg, no one is exactly sure how it got there.

The discovery was made in October by cybersecurity experts Bob Diachenko and Vinny Troia; the 4 terabytes of data they found also included Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn profile information. All told, the server contained information on four billion user accounts and 650 million unique email addresses, affecting 1.2 billion people.

As WIRED points out, though, it's important to keep in mind what the data does not include: things like passwords and credit card numbers. So at least there's that! Troia also told WIRED that the server is no longer online and that he reported its presence to the FBI.

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