Researchers at CyberNews reported last week that an unsecured database belonging to an unknown party was wiped clean by an anonymous party on March 3. It’s unclear why the data was deleted or who may have accessed it while it was available, but the outlet stressed that anyone who found the server online could have seen its contents.
The more 200 million people impacted by the leak had a number of personal details exposed, including: full names, email addresses, dates of birth, credit ratings, exact locations of homes and mortgaged real estate properties, information about their children, and detailed mortgage and tax records.
“Detailed data profiles, including information about the individuals’ personal interests, investments, as well as political, charitable, and religious donations” were also present on the server, according to the website.
The 800 gigabytes of information removed from the server not only included the data of over 200 million US citizens, but also contained folders which had emergency call logs that belong to a US-based fire department and “a list of some of the 74 bike share stations that used to belong to a bike share program.”
Ride-share company Lyft was identified as the owner of the bike stations.
As for the owner of the actual database, CyberNews researchers were unfortunately unable to identify the victim of the hack before the information was wiped.
“After having spent several weeks looking for the owners of this unprotected database, we did not manage to discover who it belonged to before the unidentified party erased all the records and left a link to a website where a dancing pirate urges visitors to fix their security,” Cybernews revealed.
However, the site’s analysts believe that the database, which is hosted on a Google Cloud server and located in the US, belonged to a credit company or data marketing firm.
As the reasoning behind the wipe remains unknown, those concerned their data was included in the leak can quickly run their email through a secure check provided by CyberNews.
