Data leak of 1.2 billion people from unprotected server

People Data Labs which is based in San Francisco is a data enrichment company working with some of the world’s biggest firms like eBay and Adidas. Last month data belonging to People Data Labs was leaked from an unprotected server. However, the server the data leak was from did not belong to People Data Labs itself.

A notification sent Friday to the people affected by the Data Leak stated that 1.2 billion records of personal data, including email addresses, employers, locations, job titles, names, phone numbers and social media profiles.

The email read:

In October 2019, security researchers Vinny Troia and Bob Diachenko identified an unprotected Elasticsearch server,

The exposed data included an index indicating it was sourced from data enrichment company People Data Labs and contained 622 million unique email addresses.

The server was not owned by People Data Labs and it’s believed that a customer failed to properly secure the database.

People Data Labs themselves have not made any comment at all about this data Leak and it is understandable since they are not the ones responsible for the leak but rather someone else they were working with who failed to protect the data properly.

There have been a lot of cases of data breaches lately in the tech world whether to look towards Facebook, WhatsApp or most recently the Chinese smartphone maker OnePlus. We have come to a point where the private information of people is no longer safe on the internet.

Follow INCPAK on Facebook / Twitter / Instagram for updates.