Personal data of millions of Americans exposed from PC in China

Personal data of millions of Americans exposed from PC in China

Security lapse or security blunder?– Private data of 56M Americans exposed from China is apparently taken from CheckPeople.com.


Security lapses are quite common nowadays and should not come as a surprise. But, there’s a difference between security lapse and blunder, and the recent incident is purely an example of the latter.


According to The Register, a white hat hacker using the Twitter handle @Lynx0x00 identified a database hosting personal sensitive data of over 56.25 million Americans. The database was stored on a computer in China using an IP address located in the Eastern Chinese region Hangzhou. 

The NoSQL database is massive, according to the hacker as it contains roughly 22GB of private data, which includes sensitive information including past and present home addresses, real name, age, and relations as well as phone numbers. What’s worse is that the database is still available for public access without any authentication.


See: Database with 1.2 billion people’s data leaked online without password


Upon further digging, it was identified that the computer was linked to the Internet via web hosting service facilitated by Alibaba. It can be termed as a grave security blunder because even researchers are perplexed regarding why the information was stored on a Chinese computer and made freely accessible to give spammers and extortionists a chance to exploit it.


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