Brazilians exposed in massive data leak

Researchers at Cybernews have uncovered a huge data leak which could potentially put the entire population of Brazil at risk.

They uncovered a publicly accessible Elasticsearch instance which contained more than 223 million records-worth of private data belonging to Brazilian individuals -- the country's current population is only around 217 million.

Elasticsearch is a tool often used for the search, analysis, and visualization of large volumes of data. The cluster, stored on a cloud server, contained data with individual taxpayer numbers, full names, date of birth, sex, and Cadastro de Pessoas Físicas (CPF) number. The 11-digit number identifies individual taxpayers in Brazil.

Although the data is no longer available it's likely that it may already be in the hands of malicious actors who could exploit it for identity theft, fraud and other cybercrimes.

The leaked data wasn't linked to a specific company or organization, which means Cybernews was unable to identify the source of the leak.

You can read more about the leak over on the Cybernews site.

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