����vlog

The data of 123 million American households was left unsecured on the internet, according to cybersecurity firm UpGuard earlier this week.As of 2016, there were 125.8 million households in the U.S. Alteryx, an Irvine, California-based software company, stored the sensitive information in an unprotected 36-GB database. The leak included 248 data fields that held consumers' addresses, phone numbers, ages, genders, mortgages, education levels, marital statuses and more."Exposed within the repository are massive data sets belonging to Alteryx partner Experian, the consumer credit reporting agency, as well as the US Census Bureau, providing data sets from both Experian and the 2010 US Census," UpGuard said on Tuesday. The incident, discovered in October, found that Amazon Web Services storage buckets containing citizens' personal data were accessible to anyone with a free account."In practical terms, an AWS 'authenticated user' is any user that has an Amazon AWS account, a base that already numbers over a million users," UpGuard explained. "...This incident reveals just how thoroughly third-party vendor risk is corroding the integrity of any public and private functions relying upon information technology," the company added. "The exposure of massive amounts of data about many millions of American households gathered by a credit reporting agency reveals how the consequences of cyber insecurity can...quickly afflict partners and expose their data as well."An Alteryx spokesperson told CNET earlier this week that no Experian accounts were impacted.But that seems unlikely, said UpGuard.“I’m a little disappointed that Alteryx would just leave it unencrypted out there for anybody, and that Experian would just give them a copy like that,” Chris Vickery, the company's cyber risk research director, told the Huffington Post on Wednesday. The realm of unsecured data is expanding - corporate breaches are increasing in frequency, and it's estimated they'll cost businesses a total of $8 trillion over the next five years, according to a report from market intelligence firm Juniper Research.In September, credit reporting agency Equifax announced a massive breach that affected 143 million Americans. Cybercriminals stole consumers' social security numbers, names, birth dates, addresses, and driver's license numbers.The Atlanta-based credit bureau discovered the incident in July and launched an investigation.