Wow, More Than Three Million Elderly Citizens In The US Are Victims Of Data Leaks

Seniors in the United States are victims of data leaks. (Unsplush Illustration)

JAKARTA - A data leak has just occurred to the elderly or senior citizens in the United States (US) who are victims. Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a misconfigured Amazon S3 bucket, which exposed personally identifiable information (PII) of more than three million senior citizens in the US.

According to TechRadar, Thursday, August 12, this data leak was discovered by researchers at the cybersecurity company WizCase. The bucket is known to belong to SeniorAdvisor, which describes itself as a website for senior care and services across the US and Canada.

The misconfigured bucket contained more than 180GB of data, revealing the names and contact details of more than three million people. No need to wait long, WizCase immediately contacted SeniorAdvisor and since then the company has secured the data leak.

“Misconfigured Amazon S3 buckets are often a cause for concern and it highlights that site owners are clearly unaware of the scale of this vulnerability, especially when data is not encrypted, leading to potentially disastrous results. These S3 buckets allow people to configure them, but people are notorious for weakening or even ignoring built-in security for various reasons, leaving them vulnerable," said ESET cybersecurity specialist Jake Moore.

Furthermore, the researchers note that Amazon S3 buckets can be accessed by anyone on the internet and the information in them is not encrypted. According to WizCase analysis, most of the data exposed is in the form of leads, and includes contact details of customers that WizCase deems to be targeted through various email or phone campaigns.

The information also lists the dates the user was contacted, ranging from 2002 to 2013, although the file itself is timestamped 2017. In addition to PII, WizCase also found about two thousand reviews removed from user details. However, all reviews have a primary id, which can be used to get the user details out without much effort.

From a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) report, WizCase argues that people in the 60 to 69 age group lost an average of $600 per fraud, and that figure increased to $1700 per fraud on average for people. in the 80 to 89 year age group.

In particular, the report found that senior citizens or seniors are more likely to fall prey to a variety of scams including tech support scams, prize or sweepstakes scams, online shopping scams, and telephone scams all of which could be done using PII in the leaked database.