Tuesday, December 19, 2017

"Another MASSIVE Data Leak: 'Life in 123 Million American Households Exposed Online'"

I'm starting to think the data gatherers don't value the security of people's information very highly.
So let's begin the valuation.
We should maybe start the bidding at, say, oh, a $5000 cash payout per person, per occurrence?
With a bond to guarantee performance?

From WCCTech:
If we haven’t seen enough mega data breaches this year, security researchers are here to end the year with a bang. This time, over 120 million American households are on the victims list, as an insecure database has exposed personally identifiable information affecting millions of people across billions of data points.

Over 123 million American households’ data exposed thanks to Experian and Alteryx
Data of over 123 million American households was stored in a massive database that was left exposed on the web. The database included extremely personal information, including American citizens’ addresses, income, mortgages, interests and hobbies, bank details, ethnicity, and more. The database had over 248 data fields for each household, UpGuard security research team has revealed.
The database was apparently left open by a marketing analytics company called Alteryx. “Exposed within the repository are massive data sets belonging to Alteryx partners Experian, the consumer credit reporting agency, and the US Census Bureau, providing full data sets for both Experian’s ConsumerView marketing database and the 2010 US Census,” the researchers wrote.
Taken together, the exposed data reveals billions of personally identifying details and data points about virtually every American household.
Researchers said that the data is sold for around $38,995 per license. Experian boasts “protecting consumers” is its top priority. However, this invasive accumulation of data and then the lack of safeguards to keep this data secure proves otherwise.

No shame in exposing data of hundreds of millions of Americans
In response to the discovery, Alteryx and Experian continue to downplay the severity of such a massive data collection process. Alteryx said in its response that it has “secured the bucket, removed the file and has taken steps to prevent this from happening in the future”....
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