Yandex May Leak Users’ Personal Data

Confidential information belonging to clients of Sberbank, VTB, Russian Railways (RZD), Aeroflot, and several government websites has been found online through Yandex’s search engine. The discovery was made by Pavel Medvedev, a Facebook user, who reported that Yandex’s search results revealed sensitive data from major Russian companies and government sites.

According to Medvedev, it is possible to find people’s names, physical addresses, phone numbers, photographs, scanned copies of documents, and more using Yandex’s search engine. One possible cause of the leak is believed to be a malfunction in the Webasyst ShopScript3 online store management tool. In 2011, this software was responsible for leaking personal data from users of more than 80 websites.

It’s worth noting that Yandex’s search engine previously indexed the contents of Google Docs. During that incident, files stored in Google Docs were publicly accessible for several hours.