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Building YOUR Social Graph

DOD was reportedly collecting BILLIONS of public internet posts from social media, news sites, and web forums and storing them on Amazon S3 repositories. But it neglected to make those storage servers private. So anyone with a free Amazon AWS account could browse and download the data, according to Chris Vickery, a security researcher at UpGuard.

Vickery noticed the problem in September. "The data exposed in one of the three buckets is estimated to contain at least 1.8 billion posts of scraped internet content over the past 8 years," UpGuard said in a Friday report.

Much of the data was scraped from news sites, web forums, and social media services such as Facebook and Twitter. The information includes content relating to Iraqi and Pakistani politics and ISIS, but also social media posts made by Americans.

Why the Defense Department was collecting this information isn't clear. But it certainly raises eyebrows at a time when concerns persist about US surveillance programs.

Topic / Subject WIRED reports UpGuard found a massive exposed database left publicly accessible online in January, containing billions of records, including Social Security numbers, raising fresh identity-theft fears even if much of the data is old or duplicated.  TL;DR / Summary WIRED says UpGuard found a huge exposed database in January containing billions of records, including SSNs, that…

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