1.5 Billion Personal Data Remain Exposed On Open Internet

The revelation that nearly 1.5 billion sensitive people and business records worldwide has been made by researchers, highlighting significant gaps in personal data protection, in addition to the recent Facebook scandal.

These are documents where everyone can have free access if they have even minimal technical training, the researchers did not even need to enter a password to get them.

About 36% of the documents identified by researchers come from countries in the European Union. The largest volume for a single country comes from the US, with 16%. There are also many documents from Asia and the Middle East.

Among these documents there are approximately 2.2 million X-rays and MRIs, 700,000 salary slips and 60,000 tax returns from private individuals. For companies, many patent, product and product claims have been found.

In most of the documents, the researchers gained access because of "poor parameter setting" when storing them.