Quote:A researcher has revealed the discovery of a federal terrorist watchlist that includes 1.9 million records, which were available online without any security protections. The data remained exposed for three more weeks even after the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was informed about it.
 
Volodymyr Diachenko, who goes colloquially as “Bob” and is head of security research at Comparitech, found the records “without a password or any other authentication required to access it” on July 19, he revealed in a post on LinkedIn.
 
“The watchlist came from the Terrorist Screening Center, a multi-agency group administered by the FBI,” he wrote in the post. “The TSC maintains the country’s no-fly list, which is a subset of the larger watchlist.”
 
The no-fly list is a list of individuals that the federal government considers dangerous or capable of terrorist activity who should not be allowed to board a commercial airliner.
 
“A typical record” in the list discovered by Diachenko included the full name, citizenship, gender, date of birth, passport number, no-fly indicator and more information of the suspected terrorist, he said. Diachenko posted a screenshot with information redacted from the list, on his Twitter feed.