Almost one billion people’s personal data has been breached online by a shadowy marketing company that has since disappeared without a trace.
Email addresses from 982 million people were listed in what researchers are calling one of the ‘biggest and most comprehensive email database’ breaches ever.
Personal information including names, gender, date of birth, employer, details of social media accounts and even home addresses were listed.
Security researchers uncovered the breach in an online database created by Verifications.io that had no privacy protections in place.
The firm offered an ‘enterprise email validation’ service that let other marketing firms check whether lists of email addresses they have harvested are real.
Verifications.io took down their website after the leak was uncovered and they have refused requests for a comment on the situation.
Little is known about the people behind the business with its backers maintaining their anonymity due to the dubious tactics it employs.
code: The website went offline after Cyber security expert Bob Diachenko, one of the researchers who found the breach, notified its support team.
It was unclear whether the ex posed data was accessed by others, but hackers are often quick to strike when leaks occur.
Passwords and payment card details were not leaked but other records in the collection included company names, annual revenue figures, company websites, and even personal addresses.
Mr Diachenko , along with NightLion Security’s Vinny Troya, cross-referenced the datasets with the HaveIBeenPwned database, a list of all public data breaches.
They were then able to establish that the Verifications.io leak contained unique records that had never been exposed in any previous breach ‘collections’.
‘This is perhaps the biggest and most comprehensive email database I have ever reported,’ Mr Diachenko wrote in his post.
‘Upon verification, I was shocked at the massive number of emails that were publicly accessible for anyone with an internet connection.
‘Some of data was much more detailed than just the email address and included personally identifiable information.’
The researchers said that Verifications.io offered a service to marketers where it would ‘verify’ lists of email addresses.
Marketing companies often employ third party verification companies to do this, due to tedious effort of doing this manually as well as the increased effectiveness of spam filters.
Marketing companies use these services to send out mass emails to a large email list they need to ‘validate’ to confirm whether the addresses are real or still active.
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