The private data of more than 106 million international visitors to Thailand was accessible to anyone on the Internet through an open, unsecured database. It concerns names, passport numbers, date of arrival, gender, visa type, residence status and arrival card number that were in the two hundred gigabyte Elasticsearch database.
This is search engine software for indexing all kinds of information. It is used, among other things, for searching websites, documents and applications, but can also be used for analytics, monitoring and data analysis. The database was indexed by search engine Censys on August 20.
Three days later, Comparitech security researcher Bob Diachenko discovered the database and warned the Thai government. The database was then secured.
The database’s IP address is still public, but the database itself has been replaced by a honeypot. According to the Thai authorities, the data has not been accessed by unauthorized parties.
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