Pentagon’s Data Leak Exposed 1.8 Billion of Social Media Surveillance Data

Pentagon Data Leak, other three Amazon Web Services S3 cloud storage buckets that contain social media surveillance data configured in the way that users with free AWS account can read and download the contents.

Leaked data consist of billions of public internet posts, news commentary and other writings from individuals from the US and other Countries.

Leaked data in one of the three buckets consist of more than 1.8 billion posts of content that captured around 8 years. It includes data collected from comment sections, web forums, and social media sites like Facebook.

Pentagon Data Leak Discovery

UpGuard Director of Cyber Risk Director Chris Vickery discovered these buckets with subdomain “CENTCOM-backup,” “CENTCOM-archive,” and “pacom-archive”, where the CENTCOM refers to the US command center.

Also with further investigation, they identified a settings table in “CENTCOM-backup” in bucket operated by VendorX who building Outpost for CENTCOM and defense department.

We found a folder, titled “scraped,” contains an enormous amount of XML files consisting of internet content “scraped” from the public internet since 2009 to 2015; the other CENTCOM bucket, “archive,” would be found to contain more such data, collected from 2009 to the present day.Upguard says.

Another bucket “CENTCOM-archive” contains the same set of XML file formats as like “CENTCOM-backup”. Posts stored in different languages with an emphasis on Arabic.

From the information obtained from CENTCOM bucket, seems it focused on millions of Internet posts and majorly from the Middle East and South Asia.

And the next bucket “pacom-archive” structure resembles same as like “CENTCOM-archive” but it consists of posts from Southeast, East Asian and Australia.

UpGuard says collection methods used to build these data stores remains somewhat murky.Massive in scale, it is difficult to state exactly how or why these particular posts were collected over the course of almost a decade.

Vickery says “A simple permission setting makes difference between these buckets to remain safe or exposed online”. You can read complete investigation report at UpGuard.

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13. Pentagon Data Leak Exposed 1.8 Billion of Social Media Surveillance Data