The leaked data also included unredacted credit cards and passports of millions of users around the world.
The team of security researchers at WizCase led by Ata Hakcil discovered a massive trove of data belonging to FBS, a prominent online trading broker with offices in Belize and Cyprus.
FBS is home to 16 million traders and 400,000 partners from over 190 countries.
Data exposed on an Elasticsearch server
According to researchers, FBS exposed almost 20 terabytes worth of data comprising over 16 billion records. As a result, millions of FBS customers had their personal and sensitive information accessible online.
It is worth noting that the data was left open to public access on an Elasticsearch server without any security authentication. This means that anyone with knowledge of unsecured databases could have downloaded the data with no password required.
What data was exposed？
The data, that was thoroughly analyzed by the WizCase team included:
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Country
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Addresses
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Full names
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IP addresses
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Email addresses
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Phone numbers
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Passport numbers
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Operating system
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Mobile device models
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Emails sent to FBS users
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Social media IDs including Facebook and Google
Whats worse is that the company also exposed files sent by users for account verification or identity confirmation. This included the following:
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Personal photos
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Drivers licenses
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Birth certificates
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Bank statements
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National ID cards
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Unredacted credit cards
The fact that FBS uploaded unredacted credit cards on a web server and left them exposed for public access could have a devastating impact on unsuspecting users including empty bank account, identity theft, extortion, and blackmailing scams to name a few.
However, the list of exposed data does not end here. In their blog post, Chase Williams of WizCase wrote that FBS also exposed its users IDs, their login history, unencrypted passwords encoded in base64, links to reset the password, and other sensitive information.
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