Census Records Leaked in Marketing Firm’s Exposure of 123 Million Households
On the heels of Equifax’s massive breach of American consumer data, researchers have discovered an even richer collection of personal data on 123 million American households left exposed online in an unsecured Amazon Web Services storage bucket.
Researchers at the Upguard Cyber Risk Team discovered the database of marketing and analytics firm Alteryx was configured to allow any AWS ‘Authenticated Users’ — in other words, anyone with an AWS account — to download its stored database. According to researchers, “Exposed within the repository are massive data sets belonging to Alteryx partner Experian, the consumer credit reporting agency, as well as the US Census Bureau, providing data sets from both Experian and the 2010 US Census.”
The exposed data sets included Experian’s “ConsumerView” marketing database, a product sold to other companies as “the largest and most comprehensive resource for traditional and digital marketing campaigns” claiming to have “thousands of attributes on more than 300 million consumers and 126 million households.”
The leaked data includes 248 data fields on each household. It does not include name, but it does include a wide variety of data including contact information, ethnicity, education, income, the ages of the children in the household, the details of the mortgage, whether the house has a pool, whether the residents donate to religious groups, whether they buy sports magazines, whether they’re dog enthusiasts, and more.
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