INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
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The data appears to have been used to help target marketing
Personal data about almost every Ecuadorean citizen has been found exposed online.Names, financial information and civil data about 17
million people, including 6.7 million children, was found by security company vpnMentor.The massive cache of data was found on an unsecured
cloud server almost anyone could look at
Access to the server has now been restricted thanks to Ecuador's computer emergency security team."The data breach involves a large amount
of sensitive personally identifiable information at the individual level," wrote Noam Rotem and Ran Locar, from vpnMentor.As well as basic
identity data, the exposed files include:official government ID numbersphone numbersfamily recordsmarriage dates education historieswork
recordsThe cache of information also included some financial records tallying account balances of customers of one large Ecuadorean bank
Tax records, including official revenue ID numbers for companies, were found on another file."This data breach is particularly serious
simply because of how much information was revealed about each individual," the security researchers said.The pair said they had found the
18GB of data spread across a variety of files saved on an unsecured server set up and run by Novaestrat - an Ecuadorean marketing and
analytics company.Novaestrat has not yet responded to a TheIndianSubcontinent News request for a comment or statement.The news about the
data breach was broken on the ZDNet website by reporter Catalin Cimpanu, who said it would be "as valuable as gold in the hands of criminal
gangs".Simple searches of the data could reveal lists of wealthy Ecuadoreans, their home addresses, if they had children, the cars they
drove and their registration plate numbers, he said
Access to the data had been cut off after the Ecuador Computer Emergency Response Team had been alerted, Mr Cimpanu wrote.
