Personal Data in 340 Million Records Leaked From Exactis Databases ⇥ cnet.com

Abrar Al-Heeti, CNet:

If you’re a US citizen, your personal information — your phone number, home address, email address, even how many children you have — may have just become easily available to hackers in an alleged massive data leak.

Florida-based marketing and data aggregation firm Exactis exposed a database containing nearly 340 million individual records on a publicly accessible server, Wired reported. Earlier this month, security researcher Vinny Troia found that nearly 2 terabytes of data was exposed, which seems to include personal information on hundreds of millions of US adults and millions of businesses, the report said.

“It seems like this is a database with pretty much every US citizen in it,” Troia told Wired.

It’s remarkable and deeply troubling how a private marketing company in Florida that most people haven’t heard of could conceivably have a database containing every American citizen. I doubt Exactis is the only company in possession of a database like this, too.