Unsecured servers expose over 250M global identity recordsract with Paragon spyware revived

Cybernews reports that more than 250 million individuals in Canada, Mexico, and five other countries had their identity records inadvertently leaked by misconfigured servers.

Most severely impacted by the exposure were citizens in Egypt, Turkey, and South Africa, who had their entire identity information, including names, birthdates, ID numbers, contact information, and home addresses, spilled, according to Cybernews researchers.

"It's likely that these databases were operated by a single party, due to the similar data structures, but there's no attribution as to who controlled the data, or any hard links proving that these instances belonged to the same party," said researchers.

Such a development comes after Brazil's entire population had its data exposed by an unprotected Elasticsearch instance in early 2024. Misconfigured Azure Blob storage buckets were also found to have revealed data from fintech platform Bankingly's customers in Mexico, Ecuador, Bolivia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic.