20180701 Fast jeder US Bürger von neuem Datenleck betroffen

01.07.2018 Fast jeder US Bürger von neuem Datenleck betroffen

The "Internet" knows all about nearly all

By the Equifax breach last year nearly 150 million Americans were affected, now in a new data leak even more may be affected. Exactis, a Florida-based marketing and data-aggregation firm, leaked detailed information on individual adults and businesses, a security researcher says. While the exact number of individuals affected isn’t known, the leak involved about 340 million records on a publicly available server.

And it is a lot ofinformation, the exposed information included phone numbers, home addresses, email addresses and personal characteristics for every name, such as interests and habits, plus the number, age and gender of the person’s children. Other types of information found: religion, whether a person smokes, and type of pet.

The data on 218 million individuals, including 110 million U.S. households, and 3.5 billion “consumer, business, and digital records” were available on the website of Exactis. “It seems like this is a database with pretty much every U.S. citizen in it”, Vinny Troia, a security researcher told Wired. He said he also told the Federal Bureau of Investigation about his findings.

The data leak is the biggest after last year’s Equifax breach and the number of Facebook users affected by the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, which according to Facebook was up to 87 million.