Cyber forensics course specialists have reported a cyberattack that has affected more than 80 million of property owners in the U.S. The attack campaign is reportedly still active, so the number of people affected could increase in the next few days.
Ran Locator and Noam Rotem, renowned cyber activists, discovered an exposed database; the activists report that the information contained in the database could leave more than 65% of households in the United States in a compromising situation.
The database, hosted on a Microsoft server in
the cloud, contains more than 24 GB of information from U.S. residents, and
appears to include more detailed descriptions of households than individuals.
Stored data include:
- Full
names of the inhabitants - Ages
- Income
levels - Marital
status - Full
address of the house - House’s
exact longitude and latitude
It is still unknown to whom this database
belongs, although due to the presence of the indicators “member_code”
and “score”, which are present at each entry, the cyber forensics
course specialists believe that the database operator is some kind of service
company.
Although data breach incidents have become commonplace nowadays, the type of information exposed in this database is unusual and really detailed, so millions of people are exposed to multiple variants of malicious activity.
For example, cyber forensics course specialists
consider that if a hacker has access to a person’s full name, it can be very
simple to guess their email address as well as that of their relatives (it is
very common for people to use an email address format composed by [email protected]).
On the other hand, specialists from the
International Institute of Cyber Security (IICS) consider that these people
could be victims of multiple phishing variables, which could open the way to
other variables of cyberattack, such as espionage, information theft,
ransomware infection, etc.
As if this were not enough, the fact that the
database contains so many personal details could also jeopardize the physical
integrity of people, because everything that is required to know the profile
and routine activities of a person is just a Google search away.
