c/net: “Justin Paine sits in a pub in Oakland, California, searching the internet for your most sensitive data. It doesn’t take him long to find a promising lead. On his laptop, he opens Shodan, a searchable index of cloud servers and other internet-connected devices. Then he types the keyword “Kibana,” which reveals more than 15,000 databases stored online. Paine starts digging through the results, a plate of chicken tenders and fries growing cold next to him. “This one’s from Russia. This one’s from China,” Paine said. “This one is just wide open.”

From there, Paine can sift through each database and check its contents. One database appears to have information about hotel room service. If he keeps looking deeper, he might find credit card or passport numbers. That isn’t far-fetched. In the past, he’s found databases containing patient information from drug addiction treatment centers, as well as library borrowing records and online gambling transactions. Paine is part of an informal army of web researchers who indulge an obscure passion: scouring the internet for unsecured databases. The databases — unencrypted and in plain sight — can contain all sorts of sensitive information, including names, addresses, telephone numbers, bank details, Social Security numbers and medical diagnoses. In the wrong hands, the data could be exploited for fraud, identity theft or blackmail. The data-hunting community is both eclectic and global. Some of its members are professional security experts, others are hobbyists. Some are advanced programmers, others can’t write a line of code. They’re in Ukraine, Israel, Australia, the US and just about any country you name. They share a common purpose: spurring database owners to lock down your info.

The pursuit of unsecured data is a sign of the times. Any organization — a private company, a nonprofit or a government agency — can store data on the cloud easily and cheaply. But many software tools that help put databases on the cloud leave the data exposed by default. Even when the tools do make data private from the start, not every organization has the expertise to know it should leave those protections in place. Often, the data just sits there in plain text waiting to be read. That means there’ll always be something for people like Paine to find. In April, researchers in Israel found demographic details on more than 80 million US households, including addresses, ages and income level…”