CyberNews researchers discovered an unsecured data bucket belonging to View Media that contains approximately 39 million records of American citizens. These records include, among other things, full names, home addresses, email, phone numbers, and zip codes.
What is View Media?
View Media is a digital marketing that specializes in email marketing, display advertising, design, hosting, instant messaging, and other services . The company offers targeted marketing services to American companies such as Tribune Media and Times Media Group.
In addition to millions of records on American citizens, the bucket also contains thousands of marketing newsletters, flyer designs, and banner ads created by View Media for its clients.
The database was left on a publicly accessible Amazon Web Services (AWS) server, allowing anyone to access and download the data. Following the 350 million email leak that CyberNews uncovered in August, this is the second time this summer that an unsecured Amazon data bucket containing such a large amount of user data has been discovered. The exposed View Media bucket has been inaccessible since Amazon shut it down on July 29.
The publicly available Amazon S3 data bucket contains 5,302 files, including:
- 700 documents stored in PDF files
- 59 CSV and XLS files containing a total of 38,765,297 US, of which 23,511,441 records are unique.
The data bucket was hosted on an exposed Amazon AWS server, and it is not yet known whether cybercriminals have gained access to the data stored on it. It is relatively easy for someone to find unsecured Amazon buckets and gain unauthorized access to them.
What are the consequences of this data leak?
Although the files contained in the unsecured Amazon S3 bucket do not contain highly sensitive personal information, such as social security numbers or credit card numbers, cybercriminals may use the personal information contained in the database to carry out various malicious activities. They may also use the names, email addresses, and phone numbers of affected individuals in their “businesses.”.
The contact information could be enough for spammers and phishers to launch targeted attacks against the millions of Americans who were exposed. Additionally, cybercriminals can combine the data found in this bucket with other data breaches to create profiles of potential identity theft targets.
So, if you are a US citizen, your data may be exposed in this breach. To see if you have been affected by this breach, you are advised to do the following::
- Use privacy leak checker to see if your email address has been leaked.
- If your email is among those leaked, immediately change the password you have set on it.
- Look out for possible phishing emails and spam messages. Do not click on anything suspicious, whether it is an email or text message or a link that may be contained within it.
