Millions of Bank Loan and Mortgage Documents Have Leaked Online

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: [M]illions of documents were found leaking after an exposed Elasticsearch server was found without a password. The documents contained highly sensitive financial data on tens of thousands of individuals who took out loans or mortgages over the past decade with U.S. financial institutions. The documents were converted using a technology called OCR from their original paper documents to a computer readable format and stored in the database, but they weren't easy to read. That said, it was possible to discern names, addresses, birth dates, Social Security numbers and other private financial data by anyone who knew where to find the server. Independent security researcher Bob Diachenko and TechCrunch traced the source of the leaking database to a Texas-based data and analytics company, Ascension. When reached, the company said that one of its vendors, OpticsML, a New York-based document management startup, had mishandled the data and was to blame for the data leak.

It turns out that data was exposed again -- but this time, it was the original documents. Diachenko found the second trove of data in a separate exposed Amazon S3 storage server, which too was not protected with a password. Anyone who went to an easy-to-guess web address in their web browser could have accessed the storage server to see -- and download -- the files stored inside. The bucket contained 21 files containing 23,000 pages of PDF documents stitched together -- or about 1.3 gigabytes in size. Diachenko said that portions of the data in the exposed Elasticsearch database on Wednesday matched data found in the Amazon S3 bucket, confirming that some or all of the data is the same as what was previously discovered. Like in Wednesday's report, the server contained documents from banks and financial institutions across the U.S., including loans and mortgage agreements. We also found documents from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, as well as W-2 tax forms, loan repayment schedules and other sensitive financial information. Many of the files also contained names, addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers and more.

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