Researcher discovered an unsecured database exposed online, belonging to car dealership marketing firm Dealer Leads, containing 198 million records.

The researcher Jeremiah Fowler discovered an unsecured database exposed online that belong to car dealership marketing firm Dealer Leads.

The archive containing 198 million records for a total of 413GB of data containing information of potential car buyers, vehicles, loan and finance inquiries, log data with IP addresses of visitors, and more.

“On August 19th I reported a non-password protected database that contained a massive 413GB of data and a total of 198 million records. The most shocking part was that I had seen this dataset several times in the previous weeks, but was unable to identify the owner.” reports Security Discovery. “I spent several days trying to identify the owner of the database and there was no clear indication in the millions of records.”

Dealer Leads provides content relevant and related to the auto industry for franchise and independent car dealerships, the website of the company describes itself with the following statement.

“dominates the automotive digital marketing industry with highly used automobile search strings turned i nto online inventory advertising classified sites, serv ice sit es, finance sites etc. Car shoppers have needs, and DealerLeads matches those needs in live searches.”

The Elastic database was accessible to anyone with any browser, its records included name, email, phone, address, IP, and other sensitive or identifiable information, in plain text.

The archive also included IP addresses, ports, pathways, and storage info.

The good news is that after the expert reported his discovery to the company, it has secured the database restricting public access to the archive.

At the time of writing it is not clear how long the data remained exposed online and if someone had access to its records.

“Dealer Leads acted fast to restrict public access immediately after the notification. Unfortunately, the data was exposed for an undetermined length of time and it is unclear who else may have had access to the millions of records that were publicly exposed.” Security Discovery concludes.

“It is unclear if Dealer Leads has notified individuals, dealerships, or authorities about the data incident. Because of the size and scope of the network applicants and potential customers may not know if their data was exposed,”

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, data leak)