Pentagon accidentally exposes billions of collected public social media posts
The Pentagon accidentally exposed its Web-monitoring operation by misconfigurating online storage, cybersecurity firm UpGuard discovered. Content captured from news sites, comment sections, web forums, and social media sites like Facebook, featuring multiple languages and originating from countries around the world, were collected and then stored on Amazon S3 repositories. However, The Pentagon neglected to make those cloud-based storage servers private, which left them easily accessible for anyone with an ASW account. The Department of Defense (DoD) confirmed the exposure to CNN Tech, and informed that DoD secured the data by 1 October, after UpGuard alerted officials of the problem in mid-September. It is still unclear what the reason for collecting data was. It did, however, raise concerns about the Pentagon’s surveillance of citizens of the USA and other countries, the issues of legality and privacy, as well as further concerns about government cybersecurity practices.
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