Just having to undergo a background check is bad enough, but what if all your personal and employment information was left publicly available online for anyone to access? That's exactly what happened to at least 100 million Americans

Unlike data breaches, which are usually the work of hackers, data breaches occur when a company fails to properly protect a data point about its customers, in this case one-third of the entire US population

As reported by Cybernews, the company's security researchers recently identified a number of We discovered a worrisome data breach at a company called MC2 Data, which operates public records and background check sites

Here is everything you need to know about this massive new data breach

As with other data breaches in the past, this one is likely the result of human error, not hackers The CyberNews investigative team discovered on August 7 that approximately 106,316,633 records or 22 TB of data from MC2 Data were stored in the database without passwords This meant that anyone on the Internet, including hackers, could have accessed and downloaded this information

It is estimated that at least 100 million US citizens were affected by this data breach However, as a result of this database being left unprotected online, the data of 23 million MC2 subscribers was also leaked

The leaked data included names, email addresses, IP addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, employment history, property records, legal records, work history, encrypted passwords, and even data on the families, relatives, and neighbors of those affected However, no financial information appears to have been leaked

This leaked data not only puts affected individuals at risk, but also makes it very likely that MC2 Data will face both reputational damage and potential legal action We will update this article as soon as we learn more details about this massive data breach

Typically, in the event of a major data breach, companies offer their customers the best identity theft protection services or at least free access to credit monitoring However, since MC2 Data and other identity theft companies have your data even though you are not technically a customer, this is likely not the case unless a government agency intervenes

So what can hackers do with this leaked data? Based on the type of data exposed online, a targeted phishing attack is the most likely scenario In this type of attack, hackers use information about you (which here is a lot) to create personalized phishing emails or text messages

Hackers may use these phishing messages as a means to extract more information, such as passwords or credit card details Similarly, hackers can send malicious links or malware-laden attachments to infect your computer or smartphone

With such personal and employment information out there, my best advice is to be very careful and diligent for the time being when checking your inbox and messages Beware of messages from unknown senders trying to instill a sense of urgency However, since the phone number has also been made public, you could receive a scam call

It is one thing for hackers to break into a company and steal data, it is another for a database filled with mountains of personal information to be left unprotected online without a password I hope MC2 Data and all other companies that handle sensitive data learn from this incident But I have been writing about unsecured databases for years, and there seems to be no end to this