Security researcher Chris Vickery has confirmed that web-monitoring data from the Department of Defense (DOD) was exposed through Amazon Web Services by the way the DOD configured access by authorized users. According to Vickery, anyone with a free AWS account had access to the DOD information, which included 1.8 billion internet posts that had been scraped from publicly available sites, including information about guns, scam alert websites and forums that contained offensive content.

Although none of the information was considered sensitive, it highlights that data is being exposed “haphazardly” according to Vickery, and “is a huge, epidemic sized problem.”

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