Names, financial information, and other important data of about 17 million people, including 6.7 million children were found by a security company vpnMentor. The data was sitting in an unsecured Amazon cloud server open to the public.
“The data breach involves a large amount of sensitive personally identifiable information at the individual level,” wrote Noam Rotem and Ran Locar, from vpnMentor.
Official government ID numbers, phone numbers, family records, marriage dates, education histories, and work records were included in the exposed files. The information also included financial records like balances of customers of one Ecuadorian bank, tax records, official revenue, etc.
Rotem and Locar said they found 18 GB of data was spread across a variety of filed saved on an unsecured server run by Novaestrat, Ecuadorian marketing, and analytics company.
This is the second major data leak in South America in recent times. In August, 14.3 million voters records were exposed in Chile which is around 80 percent of the country’s population.
Sources: BBC, teleSUR, ZDNet
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