The possibility that data could be inadvertently exposed in a misconfigured or otherwise unsecured database is a longtime privacy nightmare that has been difficult to fully address.
But the new discovery of a massive trove of 184 million records—including Apple, Facebook, and Google logins and credentials for accounts connected to multiple governments—underscores the risks of recklessly compiling sensitive information in a repository that could become a single point of failure. In early May, longtime data-breach hunter and security researcher Jeremiah Fowler discovered an exposed Elastic database containing 184,162,718 records across more than 47 GB of data.
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Source: WIRED News
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