Cyber security researchers at Nord Pass have published results of a study on what kind of user data is available online. Overall, the researchers almost found 9,517 unsecured databases which contain 10,463,315,645 entries, which included data as phone numbers, emails and passwords.
The exposed databases are also from 20 different countries, including India, China and the US. This report comes just days after new data from an US think tank suggested that India is the third-biggest victim of ‘significant’ cyber-attacks this millennium.
China tops with 3794 unsecured databases and exposing private details of up to 2,629,383,174 people. The United States of America comes second, with 2,703 unsecured databases and nearly 2,397,583,255 entries available online.
India is third on the list with the researchers spotting at least 520 unsecured databases in the country. These databases contain 4,878,723 entries, including emails, passwords and phone numbers.
While some data might be useless and only used for testing, much of it could damage if exposed.
Some of the largest data leaks last year resulted from exposed databases. For example, they exposed millions of Facebook records on a public Amazon server. In another incident, an unsecured database exposed information of almost 80 million US households.
The data included victims’ addresses, income and marital status as well. The most worrying part is that a persevering hacker not leaked this data. It was sitting there in a public database.
NordPass says they teamed up with a white hat hacker for its research on exposed databases. The hacker who requested to stay anonymous, scanned Elasticsearch and MongoDB libraries, looking for exposed and unprotected databases.
Once he found, he logged into those public databases and what kind of data he could find there.
He then shared with Nord Pass how many exposed databases and entries he had found.
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