Research Shows 19 Petabytes of Data Exposed Across 29,000+ Unprotected Databases

 

Researchers from CyberNews discovered that over 29,000 databases across the world are now totally inaccessible and publicly available, exposing over 19,000 terabytes of data to everyone, including threat actors. 
The majority of businesses keep confidential data in databases. Passwords, usernames, document scans, health records, bank account, and credit card information, and other vital information are all easily searchable and stored in one location. 
To steal all that valuable data, attackers don’t always need to hack them: one of the most common causes of a breach is databases that have been left unsecured, allowing anyone to access the data without a username or password. Hundreds of millions of people’s personal information can (and often does) become exposed on the internet as a result of database security flaws, allowing threat actors to exploit that data for a variety of malicious purposes, including phishing and other forms of social engineering attacks, as well as identity theft. 
According to CyberNews, hundreds of thousands of database servers are still open to everyone, with more than 29,000 insecure databases exposing nearly 19 petabytes of data to hacking, tampering, deletion, and other threats. The fact that tens of thousands of open databases have data exposed is nothing new. Indeed, cybercriminals are so aware of this that a vulnerable database can be identified and targeted by threat actors in only a few hours. 
After years of huge data breaches, ransom requests, and even crippling data wipeouts by feline hackers (meow), one would think database

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