'A Goldmine for Identity Thieves': Unprotected Database Puts 65% of American Households At Risk


'A Goldmine for Identity Thieves': Unprotected Database Puts 65% of American Households At Risk

By CHRIS MORRIS April 29, 2019

A pair of security experts has discovered an online, unprotected database that hosts personal data for 80 million American households. And, perhaps even more concerning, they’re not sure who it belongs to.

Among the data included on the 24 GB database is people’s full names, full street addresses, marital status, date of birth, income bracket, home ownership status and more. (Information such as income, dwelling type and gender is coded.)

Ran Locar and Noam Rotem of VPNMentor discovered the database and say they believe it is the first time a breach of this size has included such detailed information.

“This open database is a goldmine for identity thieves and other attackers,” they said.

Beyond identity thieves, the information on this database could be used to target older and more vulnerable people for phishing and scam attempts. Because real world locations and income levels are shown, it could be useful for real world thieves, as well.


While 80 million households are included in the database, the number of affected individuals is likely in the hundreds of millions, since most households have more than one resident. Everyone in the database is over the age of 40.

The discovery came as part of a web mapping project underway at VPNMentor. The company says it did not download the database, as if felt doing so would be an ethical breach.

Because the database was hosted on a cloud server, though, it’s unclear who it belongs to. (Locar and Rotem initially theorized an insurance, healthcare or mortgage company, but then noted that there were no account or social security numbers.) The security company is asking for help in identifying who might own the database, so they can be alerted to the vulnerability.

http://fortune.com/2019/04/29/security-gap-personal-information-breach/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Report: World’s 1st remote brain surgery via 5G network performed in China

World’s 1st remote brain surgery via 5G network performed in China Published time: 17 Mar, 2019 13:12 ·           A Chinese surgeon has performed the world’s first remote brain surgery using 5G technology, with the patient 3,000km away from the operating doctor. Dr. Ling Zhipei remotely implanted a neurostimulator into his patient’s brain on Saturday, Chinese state-run media  reports . The surgeon manipulated the instruments in the Beijing-based PLAGH hospital from a clinic subsidiary on the southern Hainan island, located 3,000km away. The surgery is said to have lasted three hours and ended successfully. The patient, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, is said to be feeling well after the pioneering operation. The doctor used a computer connected to the next-generation 5G network developed by Chinese tech giant Huawei. The new device enabled a near real-time connection, according to Dr. Ling.  “You barely feel that the patient is 3,000 kilometers away,”  he said.
Read more

BMW traps alleged thief by remotely locking him in car

BMW traps alleged thief by remotely locking him in car Stealer's Wheel? Seattle police department quotes "Watchmen" movie in a recap of the recent arrest. Tech Culture by Gael Fashingbauer Cooper December 4, 2016 5:00 PM PST It's maybe the most satisfying arrest we can imagine. Seattle police caught an alleged car thief by enlisting the help of car maker BMW to both track and then remotely lock the luckless criminal in the very car he was trying to steal. Jonah Spangenthal-Lee, deputy director of communications for the Seattle Police Department, posted a witty summary of the event on the SPD's blog on Wednesday. Turns out if you're inside a stolen car, it's perhaps not the best time to take a nap. "A car thief awoke from a sound slumber Sunday morning (Nov. 27) to find he had been remotely locked inside a stolen BMW, just as Seattle police officers were bearing down on him," Spangenthal-Lee wrote. The suspect found a ke
Read more

Visualizing The Power Of The World's Supercomputers

Visualizing The Power Of The World's Supercomputers   BY TYLER DURDEN FRIDAY, JAN 21, 2022 - 04:15 AM   A supercomputer is a machine that is built to handle billions, if not trillions of calculations at once. Each supercomputer is actually made up of many individual computers (known as nodes) that work together in parallel. A common metric for measuring the performance of these machines is  flops , or  floating point operations per second . In this visualization,  Visual Capitalist's Marcus Lu uses  November 2021 data from  TOP500  to visualize the computing power of the world’s top five supercomputers. For added context, a number of modern consumer devices were included in the comparison. Ranking by Teraflops Because supercomputers can achieve over one quadrillion flops, and consumer devices are much less powerful, we’ve used  teraflops  as our comparison metric. 1 teraflop = 1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion) flops. Supercomputer Fugaku  was completed in March 202
Read more