Image by Katie White from Pixabay In the face of the multiple waves of cyberattacks that governments, corporations, and individuals suffer almost on a daily basis, it’s very annoying to note that any form of information can still be left unguarded and unsecured despite all the cybersecurity measures that are readily available. That is why the news that personal data relating to 1.2 billion people, including email addresses, phone numbers, and LinkedIn and Facebook profile information, has been leaked online via an open and unsecured Elasticsearch server came as a shock. The said data was uncovered on 16 October 2019 by researchers Bob Diachenko and Vinny Troia of threat intelligence platform Data Viper. Diachenko and Troia were able to access and download the data via a web browser without having to use an ordinary password or any other form of authentication. According to the researchers, the first dataset was discovered to contain, among other things, data on 1.5 billion unique individuals, a billion personal email addresses including work emails for millions of decision-makers in Canada, the UK, and the US, 420 million LinkedIn URLs, a billion Facebook URLs and IDs, over 400 million phone numbers and 200 million valid US mobile phone numbers.…
