Email Verification Service leaks about 800 million email addresses

At the end of February of this year, a cybersecurity researcher found a database in MongoDB that was completely public and had a total content of 150GB. The database contains about 800 million email addresses, some of which also contain personal information such as name, phone number, and address.

After the investigation, the researcher believes that the information is from an email verification service called “Verifications.io”. Email verification services are generally used to confirm the authenticity and availability of email addresses, so that emails will not send to the wrong place. The amount of data leaked this time is very large. Researcher pointed out that this database may contains all the emails provided by customers in “Verifications.io”.

The event has been notified “Verifications.io”. “Verifications.io” closed the entire service and website on the day of receiving the notification. Currently, the website is still inaccessible.