Security News > 2021 > January > Illinois Court Exposes More Than 323,000 Sensitive Records
On September 26, 2020, researchers discovered an unsecured Elasticsearch server exposing more than 323,277 Cook County court related records containing highly sensitive personal data.
Cook County, Illinois, is the second most populous county in the U.S., with a population in excess of 5 million people.
The researchers received no response from the Cook County CTO, so there is no guarantee that the database actually belonged to Cook County.
It is worth noting that many of the details exposed by this database are far more explicit than the details published in the public court proceedings, where personal details of vulnerable people are left vague or excluded.
The speed with which the database was subsequently secured led Website Planet to comment, "We can only assume that our data exposure notice made it to the right person who was responsible for this dataset. Although the data was clearly internal court records it is still not entirely clear what role Major Scale plays currently in Cook County's IT infrastructure or the separation between the CTO and Major Scale."
WebsitePlanet has never received confirmation of its database exposure disclosure, and has found no record of Cook County publicly confirming a possible breach.