A Massive 1.2 Billion Personal Records Exposed By Hackers Online

In today’s age, the internet is our source for practically everything. Information spreads like wildfire on the web, yet a lot more people are caring a bit less than what they should about this when it comes to personal details (not to say that people are generally careless though, some people just don’t overthink at the time). With all of this easy access comes unfortunate risk – just like with anything. The biggest threat to our cybersecurity is undoubtedly hackers. These groups of people set out to expose or obtain people’s personal records for malicious intent.

Recently, Wired (a magazine which focuses on science, technology, business, politics and more) posted an article which broke the terrifying news that 1.2 billion personal records were exposed. First found by dark web researcher Vinny Troia together with another security researcher Bob Diachenko, they came across 4 terabytes of records just sitting there on an unsecured server for anyone and everyone to access. They tried to trace the person who was responsible, but the IP address just simply came back as Google Cloud Services.

The leak itself contained Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Github and linked phone numbers and work histories from LinkedIn. This totals to just under 50 million phone numbers and 622 million email addresses. According to reports, this is the second-largest personal records leak in known history.

After discovering this information, the pair took their findings to the FBI and it was wiped offline in hours. Unfortunately, though, huge scale leaks of personal records like this are more common than you would think. It isn’t unusual for dark web visitors to use their market of stolen information for malicious intent, and sometimes they get away with it too.

To read about the case in more detail and for additional information, check out Wired’s article here.