Security News > 2021 > August > Terrorist Watchlist Exposed Online with Nearly 1.9M Records

researcher has revealed the discovery of a federal terrorist watchlist that includes 1.9 million records, which were available online without any security protections.

"The watchlist came from the Terrorist Screening Center, a multi-agency group administered by the FBI," he wrote in the post.

The no-fly list is a list of individuals that the federal government considers dangerous or capable of terrorist activity who should not be allowed to board a commercial airliner.

The center manages and operates the Terrorist Screening Database, commonly known as "The watchlist," which is "a single database that contains sensitive national-security and law-enforcement information" aimed at keeping track of all the individuals the feds have targeted for potential terrorist activity, according to the site.

The exposed server that hosted the watchlist was indexed by search engines Censys and ZoomEye, Diachenko said.

"Exposure of records through misconfiguration is a major issue whether we are talking about public cloud misconfigurations or of any service exposed to the internet," he said in an email to Threatpost.

News URL

https://threatpost.com/terrorist-watchlist-exposed-online/168737/