River City Media

Name of Entity
River City Media
Organization Type
Businesses - Other
Address

Portland, OR
United States

Description
"One of the world's allegedly most prolific spamming operations inadvertently left backup databases accessible online, exposing upwards of 1.37 billion records and a raft of internal company information.Chris Vickery, a security researcher who works for the anti-virus company MacKeeper, discovered the databases, which belong to a US-based email and SMS marketing company called River City Media. In some cases, the records include the names, IP addresses, zip codes and physical addresses associated with the email addresses.The cause of the data exposure appears to be an oversight. The company used the rsync protocol to backup its MySQL databases. But those backup servers were not password-protected, Vickery says in an email to Information Security Media Group.The leak could be one of the largest of all time, but it's likely the databases contain duplicates. The databases, which were exposed for at least three months, have since been taken offline. It's unclear if other fraudsters or hackers may have already stumbled upon it. Some of records were updated as recently as January."If the databases were to be released in the wild, the damage would be astounding," Vickery says. "Abusive ex-boyfriends and stalkers everywhere would have a fresh new source of information on victims. You wouldn't feel the damage all at once, but society would indeed suffer over time."Based on preliminarily checks, at least some of the exposed data is legitimate, Vickery writes in a blog post."Investigating names from the list, through social media and work websites, usually shows that the additional details in the entry are most likely accurate," Vickery writes."More Information: http://www.databreachtoday.com/backup-error-exposes-137-billion-record-s...
Date of Breach
01/01/2017
Source