https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/03/china-smart-city-exposed/
By Zack Whittaker
TechCrunch
May 3, 2019
Smart cities are designed to make life easier for their residents: better
traffic management by clearing routes, making sure the public transport is
running on time and having cameras keeping a watchful eye from above.
But what happens when that data leaks? One such database was open for weeks for
anyone to look inside.
Security researcher John Wethington found a smart city database accessible from
a web browser without a password. He passed details of the database to
TechCrunch in an effort to get the data secured.
The database was an Elasticsearch database, storing gigabytes of data —
including facial recognition scans on hundreds of people over several months.
The data was hosted by Chinese tech giant Alibaba. The customer’s database,
which Alibaba did not name, made several references to the tech giant’s
artificial intelligence-powered cloud platform, City Brain, but Alibaba later
denied its platform was used.
“This is a database project created by a customer and hosted on the Alibaba
Cloud platform,” said an Alibaba spokesperson. “Customers are always advised
to protect their data by setting a secure password.”
[...]
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