Leaky database exposes tax records of 20 million Russians

Oct 1, 2019 04:00 pm Cyber Security 245

A few months back, we saw the personal data of over 188 million people leak due to an insecure MongoDB Database. Then in September 2019, we saw the data of almost every Ecuadorian leaked in a massive data breach. A similar incident has occurred now but with Russia.

According to a report by Comparitech, more than 20 million tax records were found on an unprotected Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elasticsearch Cluster with personally identifiable information of Russian Citizens from 2009-2016. The timeline revealed provides an overview of how the incident folded over the months:

In May 2018, the database was first found by search engines. This was possible since it was unprotected, it would not be considered a part of the deep web and hence indexable through the surface web.

On September 17, 2019, a security researcher named Bob Diachenko notified the owner of the database based in Ukraine.

Finally, on September 20, 2019, it was taken offline due to the alert by Bob.

Evident from the timeline, we could safely say that the data remained unexposed for over a year. Although it is not confirmed if the data got into unauthorized hands, we do have information on the fact that “the first database contained more than 14 million personal and tax records from 2010 to 2016, and the second included over 6 million from 2009 to 2015.”

Image of a leaked reco ..

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