Should we start looking ourselves up?
Back in July, cybersecurity researcher Bob Diachenko found what seemed to be a leaked FBI watchlist naming the personal details of close to 2 million suspected terrorists. Diachenko quickly filed a report to the Department of Homeland Security, hoping the agency would issue some sort of patch to keep this data from leaking into the wrong hands, which it did—roughly three weeks later.
“It’s not clear why it took so long, and I don’t know for sure whether any unauthorized parties accessed it,” Diachenko wrote in a Monday Linkedin post describing the incident, which was first reported by Bleeping Computer. He went on to add that the exposed server where he found the watchlist was already freely available on hacker-friendly search engines like Censys and Zoomeye, no passwords needed.
Secret FBI Watchlist Leaks Online, and Boy Do the Feds Think a Lot of People Are Terrorists
The watchlist, which included 1.9 million records, was left exposed online for three weeks, according to the researcher who found it.
gizmodo.com
Back in July, cybersecurity researcher Bob Diachenko found what seemed to be a leaked FBI watchlist naming the personal details of close to 2 million suspected terrorists. Diachenko quickly filed a report to the Department of Homeland Security, hoping the agency would issue some sort of patch to keep this data from leaking into the wrong hands, which it did—roughly three weeks later.
“It’s not clear why it took so long, and I don’t know for sure whether any unauthorized parties accessed it,” Diachenko wrote in a Monday Linkedin post describing the incident, which was first reported by Bleeping Computer. He went on to add that the exposed server where he found the watchlist was already freely available on hacker-friendly search engines like Censys and Zoomeye, no passwords needed.