Back in July, cybersecurity researcher Bob Diachenko found what gave the impression to be a leaked FBI watchlist naming the non-public particulars of near 2 million suspected terrorists. Diachenko rapidly filed a report back to the Department of Homeland Security, hoping the company would subject some kind of patch to maintain this information from leaking into the improper fingers, which it did—roughly three weeks later.

“It’s not clear why it took so long, and I don’t know for sure whether any unauthorized parties accessed it,” Diachenko wrote in a Monday Linkedin post describing the incident, which was first reported by Bleeping Computer. He went on so as to add that the uncovered server the place he discovered the watchlist was already freely accessible on hacker-friendly engines like google like Censys and Zoomeye, no passwords wanted.

According to Diachenko, the dataset got here from the Terrorist Screening Center (TSC), an FBI-led federal collective liable for sustaining the 1000’s of information within the authorities’s no-fly listing—a subset of the FBI’s much, much larger terrorist watchlist. The TSC contains “select international partners,” in keeping with the FBI. Diachenko says the IP tackle linked to the leaked database was primarily based in Bahrain.

In a nutshell, the no-fly listing is strictly what it seems like: a listing of people who find themselves branded by the federal authorities as potential terrorist threats and barred from boarding any planes heading into, out of, or throughout the U.S. in consequence.

This seems to be the listing—or a portion of the listing—that Diachenko stumbled onto in his preliminary analysis. While he couldn’t say for positive whether or not your complete listing was uncovered within the leak, he was capable of finding about 1.9 million information detailing people’ no-fly statuses, full names, citizenship, genders, passport numbers, and extra.

“I do not know how much of the full TSC Watchlist it stored,” he wrote, “but it seems plausible that the entire list was exposed.”

Undoubtedly, just a few of the names in that sea of information are going to belong to harmless folks. The no-fly listing is infamous for branding innocent individuals as potential threats to nationwide safety primarily based on defective information, after which making it near-impossible for them to get their names off. This previous April, a Michigan man partnered with the American Civil Liberties Union to sue FBI Director Christopher Wray after the company falsely accused him of being a Hezbollah agent and slapped him with the “no-fly” label.

“The terrorist watchlist is made up of people who are suspected of terrorism but who have not necessarily been charged with any crime,” Diachenko wrote. “In the wrong hands, this list could be used to oppress, harass, or persecute people on the list and their families. It could cause any number of personal and professional problems for innocent people whose names are included in the list.”