The research team at Cybernews discovered a data leak incident impacting hundreds of millions of Brazilian citizens, exposing their PII in the public domain.
The exposed data was hosted on a cloud server, which is now unavailable. It’s unknown to whom the server belongs and who accessed the data when it was online. But If exploited, this data can let hackers steal financial and other personal information from the affected people.
Data Leak of Brazilian Citizens
Researchers at Cybernews discovered a cloud server exposing the PII of hundreds of millions of Brazilian citizens, affecting their digital lives. This incident was confirmed by Bob Diachenko, a renowned security researcher, who claims to have “seen this data when it was live“.
Yes, I've seen this data when it was live. Yes, it is as simple as it gets.https://t.co/FX5TVQGXrR
— Bob Diachenko 🇺🇦 (@MayhemDayOne) January 9, 2024
Performing an Elasticsearch query, the Cybernews team spotted a cloud server exposing over 223 million records of Brazilian citizens – almost equal to it’s entire population. While it’s a staggering figure, Cybernews could not identify to whom the server belongs.
Anyhow, the cluster exposed details like individual taxpayer numbers, full names, dates of birth, sex, and Cadastro de Pessoas Físicas numbers (a 11-digit number given to individual taxpayers in Brazil.) While the data is no longer publicly available, it’s unknown whether any threat actor has accessed it.
Hackers abusing this data can use it for identity theft and financial fraud, so it’s advised to monitor your bank accounts for suspicious transactions. If you found any, report it to relevant authorities immediately.
This isn’t the first time data of such scale has been exposed. Earlier this year, threat actors listed 23TB of data belonging to a billion Chinese nationals and several billion case records from the Shanghai police. Further, the PII of over 105 million Indonesian citizens has also been leaked and offered for sale on underground forums.
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