Cybersecurity researchers have recently discovered an unsecured database related to Microsoft Bing Mobile App that could have exposed over 100 million search records stored on the database. They also suspect that the unsecured database could have been targeted with a Meow Attack, where hackers use data scrapping tools to copy the data and then clean up an entire database.
What’s interesting about the find is that most of the searches stored on the Bing app’s database were related to ‘Hate Crime’, ‘Gun shooting’ and ‘Child P0$*graphy
Wizcase is the firm that has discovered the security vulnerability in a Bing app database and added in its statement released yesterday that the data server was left exposed to hackers between Sept 15th to Sept 18 of this year as it was not protected with a password for reasons best known to the company managing the Microsoft search engine queries.
Ata Hakcil is the security researcher who exposed the vulnerability to the world and confirmed that over 6.5 terabytes of data was exposed in the exposed hack.
Chase Williams, the researcher at Wizcase added that anyone who made a Bing search during the said time could have landed on the server and details of his/her like location coordinates and search queries could have been accessed by hackers- information that can be used in phishing scams and blackmail attacks in future by simply copy+ pasting information on Google maps to track down an individual who made the query.
Microsoft reacted to the news quickly and secured the database on an immediate note. But did not confirm whether the data was accessed or transmitted to remote servers by hackers.
