Nearly 700,000 Plaintext Records of American Express India Customers Personal Info Exposed Online

An American Express branch in India exposed millions of customers data online form an unprotected Mongo DB, which allows anyone to access and edit the information.

The unprotected Mongo DB was discovered by Bob Diachenko from cybersecurity firm Hacken by using Shodan and BinaryEdge.

Diachenko found several collections of data contained readable links, access details for services and accounts hosted under the americanexpressindia.co.in domain.

The exposed database contains 689,272 unencrypted Records which includes Amex India customers’ phone numbers, names, email addresses, and ‘type of card’ description fields.

Most parts of the records in the database are encrypted, the encrypted data included 2,332,115 records which included names, addresses, Aadhar numbers (Indian government unique ID number), PAN card numbers and phone numbers.

“Upon closer examination, I am inclined to believe that the database was not managed by AmEx itself but instead by one their subcontractors who were responsible for SEO or lead generation”, Diachenko said.

Diachenko contacted American Express incident response team and the database was secured now from public access. Also, the team confirmed there is no unauthorized access to the environment where the data resides.

We applaud AmEx’s rapid response to this issue, noting they immediately took down that server upon notification and began further investigations, reads Hackerproof blog post.

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