Pierluigi Paganini
January 10, 2020
A database containing the personal details of 56.25 million US residents that allegedly belongs to the CheckPeople.com website was exposed online on a server having a Chinese IP address.
The huge trove of data includes names, home addresses, phone numbers, and ages. The size of the NoSQL database is 22GB and included metadata that links the collection to CheckPeople.com.
The CheckPeople.com service allows subscribed users to search for information about people of interest (i.e.
The strange aspect of this discovery is that the archive is exposed on an IP address operated by an Alibaba’s web hosting company in Hangzhou, China.
“However, all of this information is not only sitting in one place for spammers, miscreants, and other netizens to download in bulk, but it’s being served from an IP address associated with Alibaba’s web hosting wing in Hangzhou, east China, for reasons unknown.” reads the post published by The Register that reported the news in exclusive. “It’s a perfect illustration that not only is this sort of personal information in circulation, but it’s also in the hands of foreign adversaries.”
The archive was discovered by a white-hat hacker that goes online with the
“In and of itself, the data is harmless, it’s public data, but bundled like this I think it could actually be worth a lot to some people,” Lynx told El Reg this week. “That’s what scares me, when people start combining these with other datasets.”
The archive did not contain criminal record searches, even if this kind of information is provided by the
The Register has attempted to report the discovery to
It is not clear if
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