Do you like cats?
How old are your kids?
What kind of shopping "behaviors" do you exhibit?
Compared to others, where does your household income rank?
This is the kind of very personal information that was left exposed. Along with details on your house, your mortgage, your car, and your credit.
Billions of points of data on 123 million American households were in an unsecured AWS S3 bucket. If you use AWS, be sure you watch for this pitfall.
The exposed files belong to Alteryx, a data and analytics firm.
"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."
In short, it was a powerful mix of public and private data conveniently packaged together.
The S3 bucket was configured to allow access to "any" AWS user. So if your company uses the cloud service, you could have downloaded the information.
UpGuard Security researchers did the work on this one.
They have an extensive post that includes fascinating tidbits about how much data there is on you that is being collected, compiled, and sold.
And sometimes left exposed.
By the way: you do like cats, right?