It has been reported that Israeli marketing company Straffic has leaked personal sensitive data of millions of unsuspecting users mostly from the US and Europe. The leak took place due to a misconfigured Elasticsearch database. Unlike other data breaches involving search engine software Elasticsearch, where databases are accessible without a password due to misconfiguration, the database was protected in this case. However, the password to access the database was in a plaintext file exposed to the public on another domain. Originally, the database was identified by a security researcher “@0m3n” who gained access to 140 GB worth of records. This included 49 million unique e-mail addresses, names, gender, telephone numbers and addresses of Americans and Europeans.
