More than 4 billion user records leaked in “biggest infringement ever” – this is what you need to know
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- A huge data set was discovered by researchers online by researchers
- This contained around 4 billion records – including personal information
- The data may be part of a security effort that focuses on Chinese citizens
An open copy with “billions on billions” exposed records has been discovered online by researchers from cyber security – and millions of people can therefore be at risk.
Researcher at Cybernews Worked together with cyber security researcher and owner of cyber risk and data protection site securitydiscovery.com to discover a huge database without a password, with 631 GB of information leaking, which corresponds to around 4 billion records.
The data set consists mainly of Chinese customers and users of different sources, in what the Cybernews research teams believed that a “carefully collected and maintained” database is designed to build “extensive behavioral, economic and social profiles of almost every Chinese citizen.”
A surveillance effort
This can be part of a surveillance project, claim researchers, and there are numerous ways in which a threat actor could use this information, such as Social Engineering, attacks, attacks Identity theft, Fraud or even blackmail.
“The enormous volume and diversity of data types in this leak suggests that this was probably a centralized aggregation point, possibly maintained for surveillance, profiling or data enrichment purposes,” the team noted.
The copy was “” quickly deleted “after it was discovered, but it is not known how long it was open. Not surprising for suspected security data, the information contains PII such as full names, birth dates and telephone numbers, as well as financial data such as card numbers, debts and debts and information information and spending roads.
The largest collection of records probably came from WeChat, a Chinese alternative for WhatsAppexposed by more than 805 million records.
Close behind was a collection of residential data “with geographical identification data” with 780 million, and a collection called “Bank” of 630 million records, mainly with financial and personally identifiable information.
If this data breach is as great as it seems, it contains more than a billion records than the National Public Data Squarewho was recently reported as one of the largest data breaches ever.
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