Roger Fingas
Security researchers have reportedly uncovered an unsecured database containing the details of over 80 million U.S. households, including names and addresses.
The database is hosted on a Microsoft cloud server, but its owner is unknown, according to vpnMentor. Other exposed details include ages, incomes, birthdays, and marital status, though some aspects — such as income — are coded, meaning they'd have to be interpreted. Names, ages, and addresses are out in the open.
Credit cards and Social Security numbers are absent, but the included data could potentially be used to commit identity fraud.
All of the listed people are over 40, many of them senior citizens.
The vpnMentor researchers are asking for help identifying the responsible party. Researchers said they suspect the database is owned by an insurance, healthcare, or mortgage firm, but it's missing data that brokers and banks would normally need, such as account numbers and payment methods.
Exposed databases have become a concern for researchers and the public alike, thanks in no small part to security breaches at companies like Yahoo, Facebook, and Equifax. Facebook has admitted to multiple such breaches, most recently a March incident where "hundreds of millions" of plain-text passwords were found unprotected on internal servers.
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14 Comments
Oncoming Identity Theft apocalypse in 3... 2... 1....
Some days I'm not sure if we can trust big companies not to expose all our data.
It would be nice if those researchers would just go delete all that data. If the owners don’t have a back up for it, too bad.
Sounds like a phonebook...that has our names and addresses....ever since Equifax we’ve been screwed anyway.
With the so called FREE ID THEFT MONITORING likely a billion dollar business sprouting all over, I am suspicious of companies creating "accidental" releases so that they can turn it into $10/month of monitoring for all those people that forget they are paying for it after the first year free.