Security

Why is a 22GB database containing 56 million US folks' personal details sitting on the open internet using a Chinese IP address? Seriously, why?

If CheckPeople could take a look at this, that would be great


Exclusive A database containing the personal details of 56.25m US residents – from names and home addresses to phone numbers and ages – has been found on the public internet, served from a computer with a Chinese IP address, bizarrely enough.

The information silo appears to have been obtained somehow from Florida-based CheckPeople.com, which is a typical people-finder website: for a fee, you can enter someone's name, and it will look up their current and past addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, names of relatives, and even criminal records in some cases, all presumably gathered from public records.

However, all of this information is not only sitting in one place for spammers, miscreants, and other netizens to download in bulk, it's being served from an IP address associated with Alibaba's web hosting wing in Hangzhou, east China, for reasons unknown. It is a perfect illustration that not only is this sort of personal information in circulation, it's also in the hands of foreign adversaries.

A white-hat hacker operating under the handle Lynx discovered the trove online, and tipped off The Register. He told us he found the 22GB database exposed on the internet, including metadata that links the collection to CheckPeople.com. We have withheld further details for privacy protection reasons.

The repository's contents are likely scraped from public records, though collected all together provide detailed profiles on tens of millions of folks in America. Basically, CheckPeople.com has done the hard work of aggregating public personal records, and this exposed NoSQL database makes that info even easier to crawl and process.

"In and of itself, the data is harmless, it's public data, but bundled like this I think it could actually be worth a lot to some people," Lynx told El Reg this week. "That's what scares me, when people start combining these with other datasets."

While CheckPeople.com also offers criminal record searches, Lynx did not find that information among the cache.

AWS has new tool for those leaky S3 buckets so, yeah, you might need to reconfigure a few things

READ MORE

The Register has repeatedly attempted to reach a human at CheckPeople to alert it to the leak, and the site's administrators have yet to respond. Its customer-support call center directed us to email the company, although our messages were subsequently ignored, it appears. Similarly, Lynx told us he has been unable to get hold of anyone beyond a third-party call center worker.

You would think a company trafficking in personal records would care a bit more about being able to be reached.

Whether this is data somehow siphoned from CheckPeople by a Chinese outfit and dumped lazily online, or a CheckPeople server hosted in China, is unclear.

However, under the laws of the People's Republic, government agencies can more or less search any machine at any time in the Middle Kingdom, meaning profiles on 56.5 million American residents appear to be at the fingertips of China, thanks to CheckPeople – we assume Beijing has files on all of us, though, to be fair.

Again, repeated attempts to contact CheckPeople for its side of the story were unsuccessful. Should the company decide to get in touch, we will update this story as needed. We have also pinged Alibaba to alert it to the exposed database, should it care about Americans' privacy. ®

Updated to add

An attorney for CheckPeople.com told us on Friday that the business is probing the matter:

CheckPeople is unaware of any database of information hosted in China or through Alibaba. CheckPeople’s records are stored in the United States on secure servers. However, CheckPeople takes security issues very seriously and is investigating this matter.

We understand the database has been removed from the Chinese server. Redacted screenshots of the records can be seen here.

Send us news
169 Comments

US Congress goes bang, bang, on TikTok sale-or-ban plan

Bill proposes to do to China what China already does to the US – make life hard for foreign social networks

UK elections are unaffected by China's cyber-interference, says deputy PM

Sanctions galore for APT31, which has been blamed for two major attacks on democracy

How to improve Chinese TV? Better censorship, says top tellie-maker

Sales are down at home and poor compared to other nations

Apple to settle class action for $490 million after Tim overcooked China outlook

CEO's optimism was not reflected in the supply chain

Microsoft faces bipartisan criticism for alleged censorship on Bing in China

Redmond says it does what it's told, but still thinks users are better off

Beijing issues list of approved CPUs – with no Intel or AMD

2024 may be the year of Linux On The Arm-or-RISC-desktop as China moves away from Western tech

US charges Chinese nationals with cyber-spying on pretty much everyone for Beijing

Plus: Alleged front sanctioned, UK blames PRC for Electoral Commission theft, and does America need a Cyber Force?

New Zealand to world: China attacked us, too!

Reveals 2021 incident that saw parliamentary agencies briefly probed

Apple iPhone AI to be powered by Baidu in China, maybe

Of course it's called ERNIE seeing as Google has BERT

Samsung and SK halt sales of used chipmaking gear to brokers

Reports indicate Korean giants fear 'backlash' from US over resale of lithography equipment to Middle Kingdom

India quickly unwinds requirement for government approval of AIs

Also: US woos Thailand, Philippines, for tech trade; China's Fukushima rage glows; Alibaba targets South Korea

Chinese snoops use F5, ConnectWise bugs to sell access into top US, UK networks

Crew may well be working under contract for Beijing