The exposure of 7.4 billion personal information-laden records, including some login credentials, at France’s Le Figaro underscores how unsecured databases persist even in a world hyperaware of privacy and data security.
The database, exposed by an unsecured Elasticsearch server and containing more than 8TB of data on reporters, employees and 42,000 of the daily newspaper’s users, was discovered by researcher Anurag Sen and his Security Detectives team, according to a Bleeping Computer report.
The information included names, emails, addresses and zip codes for users already in the database prior to its February 2020 exposures, but for new users, the data included login credentials such as hashed plain text passwords. The researchers also found IP addresses as well as tokens for internal server access.
