Site hosting leaked celebrity data goes offline
- 18 March, 2013 15:57
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A site that published the private information and credit reports of several celebrities and other public figures last week went offline on Sunday. The last person to have his alleged private information exposed on the site was CIA director John Brennan.
Called "Exposed.su," the site was used by hackers last week to leak the addresses, birth dates, Social Security numbers and in some cases the credit reports of politicians, businessmen and celebrities, including former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, FBI Director Robert Mueller, Donald Trump, Bill Gates, Jay Z, Hulk Hogan, Paris Hilton and others.
On Friday the site published the supposed Social Security number, birth date, phone numbers, current and former addresses, as well as the personal credit report of CIA director John Brennan.
After the site went offline, many pages containing the leaked private information disappeared from Google's cache. However, cached versions of some of them, including those corresponding to Brennan, are still available for viewing through Microsoft's Bing search engine.
Last week, Exposed.su was using the global content delivery network of a San Francisco-based company called CloudFlare to stay online. The domain name still points to CloudFlare's name servers, but it's not clear if the current outage is the result of the U.S. company deciding to terminate its service for the site.
CloudFlare did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent Monday.
A spokesman for Equifax, one of the three main U.S. credit-rating agencies, said last week that the source for the leaked credit reports appears to have been "Annualcreditreport.com," a website that allows consumers to download free copies of their credit reports. The FBI is currently investigating the breach.
After Exposed.su went down on Sunday, some people tried to set up a copy at crimeopen.com. At the moment, the Web server behind that site responds with a "404 Not Found" error.
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