Word just go out that the marketing firm EXACTIS has in its possession a database with close to 340 million individual records available until recently ( as of June 2018) on a publicly accessible server. The balk of the database comprises “close to 2 terabytes of data that appears to include personal information on hundreds of millions of American adults, as well as millions of businesses,” claims the magazine WIRED. In their article on the subject, WIRED provides further details:
While the precise number of individuals included in the data isn’t clear—and the leak doesn’t seem to contain credit card information or Social Security numbers—it does go into minute detail for each individual listed, including phone numbers, home addresses, email addresses, and other highly personal characteristics for every name. The categories range from interests and habits to the number, age, and gender of the person’s children. “It seems like this is a database with pretty much every US citizen in it,” says Troia, who is the founder of his own New York-based security company, Night Lion Security. Troia notes that almost every person he’s searched for in the database, he’s found.
You may need to go check https://haveibeenpwned.com/ by Troy Hunt to see if your email address was among the leaked data and to sign up for a notification should your email address appear in such a leak and become available to ‘;–have i been pwned? (HIBP).
As HIBP suggests in one of their recent emails, monitoring Have I Been Pwned for data breaches is a great start, you should take two more steps to protect all your accounts:
- Protect yourself with strong, unique passwords for each website with a password manager like 1Password or LastPass or any of good one of your choice.
- Enable 2 factor authentication and store the codes inside your password manager.
Further recommendation would be that you keep an eye out on your credit records and any other possible social engineering attacks against you or your family.