Report: “1.2 Billion Records Found Exposed Online in a Single Server”

From Wired:

In October, dark web researcher Vinny Troia found one such trove sitting exposed and easily accessible on an unsecured server, comprising 4 terabytes of personal information—about 1.2 billion records in all.

While the collection is impressive for its sheer volume, the data doesn’t include sensitive information like passwords, credit card numbers, or Social Security numbers. It does, though, contain profiles of hundreds of millions of people that include home and cell phone numbers, associated social media profiles like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Github, work histories seemingly scraped from LinkedIn, almost 50 million unique phone numbers, and 622 million unique email addresses.

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WIRED checked six people’s personal email addresses against the data set; four were there and returned accurate profiles. Troia reported the exposure to contacts at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Within a few hours, he says, someone pulled the server and the exposed data offline. The FBI declined to comment for this story.

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