On Friday, the US-based title insurance company First American Financial Corporation, revealed that an oversight in their system lead to the release of over 800 million records, the New York Times reveals. This most recent flub follows recent clamour from entities in and outside of the US to implement a GDPR like solution in the nation.

A “vulnerability” in the companies system exposed 885 million records in total, most of which related to mortgage deals. The records are said to date as far as 16 years back.

“The vulnerability would have allowed anyone to gain access to Social Security numbers, bank account details, drivers license and mortgage and tax records.”

This marks another example of a company that passed by unnoticed given the amount of user information they have access to. Their inability to protect the information mirrors that of other companies such as Equifax.

First American also provided the following statement on Friday:

“We are currently evaluating what effect, if any, this had on the security of customer information,”

“We will have no further comment until our internal review is completed.”

Brian Krebs, the cybersecurity reporter who blew the whistle on Facebook storing millions of user passwords, was the first to report on this security gap. Once he was alerted to the error, Krebs reached out to First American and gave them a chance to fix the problem before publishing his findings.

“All that was needed to exploit the vulnerability was tweaking a single digit in the address of a file reached through the site. No password or other login credentials were required. Most of the 885 million exposed files were wire transactions with bank account numbers, data that First American collects because it is a widely used seller of real estate title insurance.”

What This Means For The Digital You

As the world continues to develop the way user’s personal data is treated, your ability to understand how it affects the Digital You should develop as well.

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