One of the largest companies specializing in tracking the location of Americans through smartphone data, Gravy Analytics, has been hacked by Russian cybercriminals.
The incident represents one of the largest breaches against a number of controversial companies, which sell people’s geographic location data, which can then be used by advertisers to thoroughly map a citizen’s life.
Gravy Analytics, and its subsidiary, Venntel, were charged last month by the Federal Trade Commission with illegally collecting and selling the location data of U.S. residents without their knowledge or appropriate legal consent.
Some of the people “supervised” by Gravy were monitored as they entered sensitive locations such as government buildings, health clinics and places of worship. According to the FTC complaint, the company said it collects, processes and manages more than 17 billion signals from people’s smartphones every day.
Earlier in the week, the company noted unauthorized access to its Amazon Web Services cloud storage. Later, on a well-known Russian cybercrime forum, XSS, a user claimed to have hacked the company’s site. As proof, he then decided to post several screenshots and 17 terabytes of information.
The hacker then wrote a further comment, in Russian, stating that if the company did not give him money he would upload to the web more sensitive data stolen from the archive. The cybercriminal did not specify the amount of money he expected to receive from Gravy. The files were later removed, but not before receiving several views and re-shares among forum users.
According to specialists, the hacker had posted the e-mail addresses of more than 300,000 individuals on the Web. The individuals tracked were from more than 30 million locations worldwide. The data released did not contain the identities of the individuals involved. However, experts say location information can make it easier to identify individuals.
As NBC explained, to date the United States does not have a comprehensive federal privacy law. An issue that, in part because of incidents like this one, continues to surface with increasing frequency.
