An Amazon S3 Bucket left unsecured 123 Million Americans exposed

in experian •  7 years ago 


A US company, Alteryx, left an Amazon S3 bucket exposed online. As a result 123 Million American's details were leaked online. This comes after an NSA red disc was leaked a month ago exposing high classified information about US Army CentCom and PaCom divisions. Hackers can discover these URL's simply by having them land right in their laps if they query'd them.

What information was leaked about you?

The recent leak contained two important files that contained two database on United States Consumer Credit Reporting Agency Experian and the U.S. Census Bureau. The US Census Bureau is aways published publicly online which isn't much of a concern, but the real concern is the Experian data that was leaked about you.

The file that is very vital is "ConsumerView_10_2013.yxdb" This file contain every personal detail about every American household. To be exact the database contained over 3.5 billion details about you. The data contain history about everything you have done past 10-20 years back. It contained all your addresses, home details, ethnicity, financial information, your status on mortgages, all your purchases, contact information, and all your financial information and other personal information too many to list.

How much should I be concerned about?

So what I have been reading in the community is that the information is a few years old about you. They have everything about you but have anonymized all names in the database. BUT this can easily be bypassed because they have everyother detail about you and can query the right items to get your name. All 123 Million Americans are now exposed to Identity Theft and ghost debt. Unfortunatley this won't be the last leak that will affect us, hopefully this comes a thing of the past.

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