Millions of bank loan and mortgage documents have leaked online

Found on Techcrunch on Saturday, 26 January 2019
Browse Various

A trove of more than 24 million financial and banking documents, representing tens of thousands of loans and mortgages from some of the biggest banks in the U.S., has been found online after a server security lapse.

The server, running an Elasticsearch database, had more than a decade’s worth of data, containing loan and mortgage agreements, repayment schedules and other highly sensitive financial and tax documents that reveal an intimate insight into a person’s financial life.

With help from TechCrunch, the leak was traced back to Ascension, a data and analytics company for the financial industry, based in Fort Worth, Texas. The company provides data analysis and portfolio valuations. Among its services, the Ascension converts paper documents and handwritten notes into computer-readable files — known as OCR.

Why was the database accessible from the Internet anyway? Oh right, because we're living in the age of 2.0 where nobody is responsible anymore and security or privacy does not matter. Just imagine there would be a compensation of, let's say, only $100 per affected customer which a company has to pay who messed up.