By this point, hearing about a data breach is the sort of thing that probably won’t surprise anyone all that much. Indeed, data breaches have become so common that people have started taking matters into their own hands in order to ensure that they can keep their data as safe as possible since they don’t trust any companies to do this for them anymore. That being said, no matter how jaded you are the latest leak that has occurred will have you rubbing your eyes in disbelief over what has happened so far.
A company by the name of Verifications.io works in the field of preventing spam from reaching you, and their database contains the records of over eight hundred million people. That’s more than twice the population of the United States, and the truly horrifying thing is that the database is so incredibly easy to access. Researchers at SecurityDiscovery were able to gain access to the data simply by typing in a URL, and they found that a lot of the information in the database was extremely detailed.
The fact that all of this data was just sitting there waiting for anyone to steal it is quite scary, especially when you consider things like zip codes are mentioned there as well. One could easily cross reference this data with stolen data that has been compiled in a separate database to find out exactly where people live, and this can be very dangerous indeed. The company pulled their website and database offline after they were contacted about this hack, but one can only wonder how many other companies out there are doing even worse things with the information you give them.
Photo: Getty Images
Read Next: From Facebook, Google to Twitter, our online data is at risk and it is time we take serious measures to protect it! (infographic)
A company by the name of Verifications.io works in the field of preventing spam from reaching you, and their database contains the records of over eight hundred million people. That’s more than twice the population of the United States, and the truly horrifying thing is that the database is so incredibly easy to access. Researchers at SecurityDiscovery were able to gain access to the data simply by typing in a URL, and they found that a lot of the information in the database was extremely detailed.
The fact that all of this data was just sitting there waiting for anyone to steal it is quite scary, especially when you consider things like zip codes are mentioned there as well. One could easily cross reference this data with stolen data that has been compiled in a separate database to find out exactly where people live, and this can be very dangerous indeed. The company pulled their website and database offline after they were contacted about this hack, but one can only wonder how many other companies out there are doing even worse things with the information you give them.
Photo: Getty Images
Read Next: From Facebook, Google to Twitter, our online data is at risk and it is time we take serious measures to protect it! (infographic)
