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CyberNews, 3 Sep 2020: The CyberNews research team discovered an unsecured data bucket that belongs to View Media, an online marketing company

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CyberNews, 3 Sep 2020: The CyberNews research team discovered an unsecured data bucket that belongs to View Media, an online marketing company. The bucket contains close to 39 million US user records, including their full names, email and street addresses, phone numbers and ZIP codes. The database was left on a publicly accessible Amazon Web Services (AWS) server, allowing anyone to access and download the data. Following the 350 million email leak covered by CyberNews earlier in August, this is the second time this summer we encountered an unsecured Amazon bucket containing such massive amounts of user data. On July 29, the exposed View Media bucket was closed by Amazon and is no longer accessible. The publicly available Amazon S3 bucket contained 5,302 files, including: 700 statement of work documents for targeted email and direct mail advertising campaigns stored in PDF files; 59 CSV and XLS files that contained 38,765,297 records of US citizens in total, of which 23,511,441 records were unique. The unsecured Amazon S3 bucket appears to belong to View Media, an online marketing company that specializes in email marketing, display advertising, design, hosting, direct mails, date sales, and other digital marketing services. The company offers targeted marketing services to American publishing brands like Tribune Media and Times Media Group. Unsecured Amazon buckets are relatively easy to find and access without any kind of authorization, which means that anyone who knows where to look could have downloaded the files. We then reached out to one of the marketing company’s clients mentioned in the statement of work documents that were stored on the bucket, who helped us identify View Media as the owner of the database on August 21. On August 24, we contacted View Media for an official comment regarding the leak. However, we received no response from the company. If you are a US citizen, there is a chance that your data might be exposed in this leak.