57 Million Personal Info Records Leaked by Unprotected ElasticSearch Server

An unprotected Elasticsearch server indexed by the Shodan IoT search engine on November 14 exposed a 73 GB database of 57 million US citizens' records.

The publicly accessible server discovered by security researcher Bob Diachenko contained an Elasticsearch instance with a database of "first name, last name, employers, job title, email, address, state, zip, phone number, and IP address" personal info.

Furthermore, on the whole, Diachenko found three IP addresses which provided public access to the unprotected database of 56,934,021 million records.

The open access database also came with an extra index of 25 million records which provided some extra information such as "carrier route, latitude/longitude, census tract, phone number, web address, email, employees count, revenue numbers, NAICS codes, SIC codes."

Although there was not conclusive information at first regarding the entity behind the exposed personal information database, the researcher concluded that ...