MongoDB database Leaks Business Intelligence Data

Who: Verifications.io Website

When: 7 Mar 2019

# of records involved: 809 million records

What happened: Security researchers Bob Diachenko and Vinny Troia discovered an unprotected, publicly accessible MongoDB database containing 150 gigabytes of detailed, plaintext marketing data—including 763 million unique email addresses.

How did it happen: The trove is not only massive but also unusual; it contains data about individual consumers as well as what appears to be “business intelligence data,” like employee and revenue figures from various companies.

Outcome: This is just another case where someone has a lot of​ data and there is no idea of knowing how they got it. There’s not a lot you can do to individually protect yourself when vast repositories of data compiled from both public and private sources leak.