Security News LocalBlox found leaking info on tens of millions of individuals

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Content source

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2018/04/18/localblox-data-leak/

LocalBlox, a US-based data technology company that “crawls, discovers, extracts, indexes, maps and augments data in a variety of formats from the web and from exchange networks” and ties it all together to create profiles on individuals that contain personal, business and consumer data for marketing purposes, has been found leaking information on tens of millions of individuals.

The discovery was made by UpGuard researcher Chris Vickery, who stumbled upon the unsecured Amazon Web Services S3 bucket holding the data, bundled in a single, compressed file. When decompressed, it revealed 48 million records in a format that’s easy for anyone to peruse.

Exposed data

“The sheer breadth of the exposed data includes such information as individuals’ names, physical addresses, dates of birth, scraped LinkedIn job histories, public Facebook data, and individuals’ Twitter handles. In addition, it appears the prominent real estate site Zillow is used in the process as well, with information being somehow blended from the service’s listings into the larger data pool,” UpGuard shared in a blog post.

Other type of information that may be included in the profiles includes things like whether the person is married or single, owns a car, uses credit cards, and so on.
“The database appears to work by tracking an IP address, matching collected data to that IP address when able, and thus providing a clearer image of the behavior and background of the user at that IP address,” UpGuard noted.