42.5 Million Records Have Been Exposed From Dating Apps On Chinese Database

There has been a recent discovery of a data leak from a Chinese database and the data from it seems to associate with dating apps. Most of the users’ records seem to come from the U.S, which can be seen from their geographic locations and IP address. According to a security researcher, it was estimated that approximately 42.5 million user records were found without any password protection. 

This month, researcher Jeremiah Fowler from Security Discovery discovered a non-password protected Elastic database which was directly linked to dating apps based on what he saw from the folders’ names.

Fowler upon his previous discovery on the 25th May claimed that the IP address was situated on a U.S-based server and a great number of the users were found to be Americans which could be seen from their geographic locations and user IP address. He also found out that there were Chinese writings in the database file.

The security researcher also further suspected that the owner of the database would most likely be Chinese.

Furthermore, Fowler added that he had been able to find out that there were dating apps available online that shared similar names as those he found in the Chinese’s database upon the later investigation. And what really made him feel odd was that it was asserted that they were developed by individuals and separate companies that did not share any similarity with one another although they were all using the same database. Additionally, there was no financial information included in the database.

It is worth noting that Fowler did not imply that the developers of those apps were doing something nefarious. However, it was the fact that how they had gone so far to hide their identities that were somehow suspicious.