Privacy on the internet is becoming more and more of an issue with personal data stored online getting compromised. The number of people on the internet is huge with their personal data stored by different companies for different reasons. One such huge data breach was reported recently that compromised a huge number of records with private data of people. It’s said to be 1.2 billion records that were just personal data of people that were stored online and this entire data was breached. The data consisted of email addresses, phone numbers, names, job history, and social media profiles and might now sound like an issue to some but this makes people vulnerable to attack by hackers. With the help of these email addresses, hackers can do fraud and phishing to hack people and send them viruses, etc.
This whole data was stored by a data enrichment company named People Data Labs and this information was retrieved from an index. Security researchers Vinny Troia and Bob Diachenko were the ones to bring up this information to light. While the data breach was really huge and a lot of people got their personal data randomly stolen the owner of this data is still not clear. The server that was holding this data was not secure and it was not owned by People Data Labs Either.
The company PDL is still not very known and the information on it is also very less as of now while the company is claimed to build people data. This huge number of records is very useful for many things that include making products, person profiles, and even the development of AI. Such data that gets compromised is used in any way possible, and a whole business is running on such data records.