Information security

Web sleuths find stash of US military surveillance folders containing BILLIONS of Facebook posts about Trump, ISIS and foreign politicians

Web sleuths have stumbled across an enormous trove of US Military surveillance files that were sitting wide open on the internet. 

The three AWS S3 buckets contain billions of social media posts, web and forum comments and were gathered by officials working for the US Central Command in Tampa, Florida, and at Pacom, the US Pacific Command in Hawaii, over the last eight years. 

They include posts about Donald Trump, ISIS and foreign politicians.  

While many were not written in English or composed in the US, the files do contain some posts that were made by American citizens. 

They were found by UpGuard's Chris Vickery on September 6, 2017. 

UpGuard is a cyber security company firm which previously uncovered another stash of DoD files online. They contained the resumes and work details of thousands of military personnel. 

The new files were stored on an Amazon cloud-based storage bucket and were only made available to the public because an internal security glitch known as misconfiguration. 

It meant that any Amazon Web Services S3 user could download them.