Over 4 billion user records leaked in "largest breach ever" - here's what you need to know

• A huge dataset has been discovered unsecured online by researchers
• This contained roughly 4 billion records - including personal information
• The data could potentially be part of a surveillance effort targeting Chinese citizens

An open instance containing "billions upon billions” of exposed records has been discovered online by cybersecurity researchers - and millions of people could be at risk as a result.

Researcher at Cybernews worked with cybersecurity researcher and owner of cyber risk and data protection site SecurityDiscovery.com to uncover a huge database without a password, leaking 631GB of information, equating to roughly 4 billion records.

The dataset primarily consists of Chinese customers and users from a range of different sources, in what the Cybernews research teams believed is a “meticulously gathered and maintained” database designed to build “comprehensive behavioral, economic, and social profiles of nearly any Chinese citizen.”

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