MyRecon OSINTData Enrichment Exposure From PDL Customer
Behind the exposed accounts
In October 2019, security researchers Vinny Troia and Bob Diachenko identified an unprotected Elasticsearch server holding 1.2 billion records of personal data .
Follow the story
On 16 October 2019, Data Enrichment Exposure From PDL Customer was breached. 622,161,052 accounts were exposed, including email addresses, employers, geographic locations. MyRecon rates it 79/100, severe. That is about 1.8× the population of the United States.
How the story unfolded
Open a step to read the detail. Missing dates stay unknown.
02Entry point
In October 2019, security researchers Vinny Troia and Bob Diachenko identified an unprotected Elasticsearch server holding 1.2 billion records of personal data .
03Discovery and disclosure
A separate discovery or company-disclosure date is not established by this feed record.
04Added to the breach catalogue
2019-11-22. This is the catalogue date, not necessarily the disclosure date.
05Reported outcome
622,161,052 accounts are listed in this breach. This is a count of accounts, not necessarily individual people. The reported exposed data includes Email addresses, Employers, Geographic locations, Job titles, Names, Phone numbers, Social media profiles.
Nobody in this file signed up for anything. Data enrichment companies do not collect from you; they buy, scrape and merge from everywhere else, then sell a composite profile to businesses that want to know more about the people already in their own database. The 622 million people here were the product, not the customers.
The detail that makes it worse is where it was found. The exposed server was not the enrichment company's, it belonged to one of its customers, who had left an Elasticsearch instance on the open internet with no password. So the data was assembled by one company, sold to a second, and exposed by the second, and there was no point in that chain at which any of the 622 million people could have been asked or told.
That chain is the reason this record is worth reading even though the fields look mundane. Name, employer, job title, phone number, location and social profiles is a background check, and it is the raw material for convincing approaches that appear to come from a colleague or a recruiter. If you want to understand how the industry that built it works, the guide on how data brokers turn a leak into a profile covers it.
The story behind the breach
In October 2019, security researchers Vinny Troia and Bob Diachenko identified an unprotected Elasticsearch server holding 1.2 billion records of personal data . The exposed data included an index indicating it was sourced from data enrichment company People Data Labs (PDL) and contained 622 million unique email addresses. The server was not owned by PDL and it's believed a customer failed to properly secure the database.
Exposed information included email addresses, phone numbers, social media profiles and job history data.
Breach description from Have I Been Pwned, used under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
How did it happen?
In October 2019, security researchers Vinny Troia and Bob Diachenko identified an unprotected Elasticsearch server holding 1.2 billion records of personal data .
What was the motive?
The published account does not establish the motive. We cannot tell what the attackers intended from the exposed data alone.
Reported demands or attempts to sell data describe what happened, rather than prove every attacker's intention.
What was the outcome?
622,161,052 accounts are listed in this breach. This is a count of accounts, not necessarily individual people.
The reported exposed data includes Email addresses, Employers, Geographic locations, Job titles, Names, Phone numbers, Social media profiles.
What was exposed, and why it matters
Email addresses
The address becomes a confirmed, active target, expect more phishing, better aimed.
Employers
Connects a personal account to a workplace, which is how attackers pivot from a person to a company.
Geographic locations
Where the account was used, which narrows a person down further than most people expect.
Job titles
Identifies who has access to what, which is how targets for business email compromise are picked.
Names
Turns an anonymous address into an identified person, which is what makes targeted phishing possible.
Phone numbers
Enables SIM-swap attacks against SMS two-factor codes, and puts the number on scam-call lists indefinitely.
Social media profiles
Adds detail to a profile that can be assembled from several breaches at once.
What to do if you were in it
Questions people ask about this breach
Was my email address in the Data Enrichment Exposure From PDL Customer breach?
Use the email box on this page. The result applies only to this incident. If the provider does not cover this breach, we say so. A missing match does not prove you were unaffected.
What data was leaked in the Data Enrichment Exposure From PDL Customer breach?
email addresses, employers, geographic locations, job titles, names, phone numbers, social media profiles. Each one is explained above, along with what it means for the person it belongs to.
When did it happen, and when did it become public?
The breach is dated 16 October 2019. It was published to Have I Been Pwned on 22 November 2019, a gap of 38 days during which the data was already out.
Is the Data Enrichment Exposure From PDL Customer breach real?
Yes. Have I Been Pwned lists it as verified, meaning the data was checked against the source rather than taken on trust.
How many people were affected?
622,161,052 accounts. That is about 1.8× the population of the United States. That is accounts rather than people, one person often has several.
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Three kinds of content appear on this page and they are kept apart deliberately. The breach description is quoted from Have I Been Pwned under its licence. The severity score, the field-by-field explanation and the advice are computed from the record itself, every sentence derives from a number or a flag in it, which is what stops the analysis drifting from the evidence. Anything under the "MyRecon's take" byline is editorial: our reading of this breach, presented as opinion rather than as a finding.