Newly-reported data leak could affect 150M U.S. adults

Published 12:00 am Saturday, June 30, 2018

A new data leak could affect hundreds of millions of Americans, perhaps more than the nearly 150 million affected by the Equifax breach.

Exactis, a Florida-based marketing and data-aggregation firm, leaked detailed information on individual adults and businesses, a security researcher said. While the exact number of people affected isn’t known, the leak involved about 340 million records on a publicly available server.

Wired was the first to report that the exposed information included phone numbers, home addresses, email addresses and personal characteristics for every name, such as interests and habits, plus the number, age and gender of the person’s children. Other types of information found included religion, whether a person smokes and type of pet.

No evidence has surfaced that anyone with malicious intent obtained the Exactis data.

On the website of Exactis, the company claims to have data on 218 million individuals, including 110 million U.S. households.

Vinny Troia, the security researcher who discovered the leak and reported it to Exactis said Thursday that he looked for about 40 or 50 names, and everybody came up. “I searched celebrities; I searched people I know,” he said.

“It seems like this is a database with pretty much every U.S. citizen in it,” Troia, founder of security company Night Lion Security, told Wired. “I don’t know where the data is coming from, but it’s one of the most comprehensive collections I’ve ever seen.”

If the Exactis numbers are accurate, the leak would make it one of the biggest data security breaches in a while, topping last year’s Equifax breach and the number of Facebook users affected by the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, which according to Facebook was up to 87 million.

The information leaked by Exactis did not include Social Security numbers like the Equifax breach did. But it did include some general financial information, Troia said.

“When I looked myself up, I found the name of my mortgage lender, the value class of my home and whether or not I had certain kind of credit card,” Troia said.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center, told Wired that the information leaked could be used to impersonate others.

Exactis did not return a request for comment.

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