November 22, 2019 By Tara Seals
Although the data was legitimately scraped by legally operating firms, the security and privacy implications are numerous.
An open Elasticsearch server has exposed the rich profiles of more than 1.2 billion people to the open internet.
First found on October 16 by researchers Bob Diachenko and Vinny Troia, the database contains more than 4 terabytes of data. It consists of scraped information from social media sources like Facebook and LinkedIn, combined with names, personal and work email addresses, phone numbers, Twitter and Github URLs, and other data commonly available from data brokers – i.e., companies which specialize in supporting targeted advertising, marketing and messaging services.
Taken together, the profiles provide a 360-degree view of individuals, including their employment and education histories. All of the information was unprotected, with no login needed to access it.
