Online marketing company exposes 38+ million US citizen records

[HempBoosh]

Summary

The CyberNews research team discovered an unsecured data bucket that belongs to View Media, an online marketing company. The bucket contains close to 39 million US user records, including their full names, email and street addresses, phone numbers and ZIP codes.

On July 29, the exposed View Media bucket was closed by Amazon and is no longer accessible.

 

Quotes

Quote

 

The publicly available Amazon S3 bucket contained 5,302 files, including:

• 700 statement of work documents for targeted email and direct mail advertising campaigns stored in PDF files
• 59 CSV and XLS files that contained 38,765,297 records of US citizens in total, of which 23,511,441 records were unique

The user record files were created based on locations and ZIP codes that the marketing company’s campaigns were targeting and contained full names, addresses, zip codes, emails, and phone numbers of people based in the US.

 

Quote

The unsecured Amazon S3 bucket appears to belong to View Media, an online marketing company that specializes in email marketing, display advertising, design, hosting, direct mails, date sales, and other digital marketing services. The company offers targeted marketing services to American publishing brands like Tribune Media and Times Media Group.

 

My thoughts

This is a huge amount of personal data and it's frustrating that the company refused to comment or even notify users of this leak. It's really annoying that we have to suffer because some company decides it would be better to save face. We really need to hold these companies more accountable.

 

Sources

https://cybernews.com/security/online-marketing-company-exposes-data-of-millions-americans/

[StDragon]

It's the new normal. If you're large enough like a major US credit agency, you don't even get a slap on the wrist. More like a stern look and a shake of the index finger.

 

#same as it ever was.

[Crazy Ginger]

Every time I see one of these headlines, im internally saying to myself "Please don't be another bucket breach...  Please don't be another bucket breach...  GOD DAMMIT ITS ANOTHER BUCKET BREACH, WHY ARE PEOPLE SO DAMN STUPID?"  It takes effort to make an s3 bucket insecure.  How do people keep screwing that up?

[williamcll]

At this rate someone will stage a robbery to steal hard drives from Amazon's servers.

[Kisai]

28 minutes ago, williamcll said:

At this rate someone will stage a robbery to steal hard drives from Amazon's servers.

Nah. At the rate "stuff was stolen from AWS" is going, there will be Russian tourists invited in the front door.

[Quinnell]

Oh look.  Yet another massive privacy breach.  These companies need more significant penalties for this sort of thing.  A few million dollars in fines is like pocket change to them.