Cook County Illinois Data Breach (2020)

A non-password protected database exposed 323,000 court records for at least four months, according to researchers. The database exposed the names of various people involved in sensitive criminal, domestic-abuse or child-custody court cases, related to a county in Illinois. Researchers from Website Planet (in conjunction with security researcher Jeremiah Fowler) said they don’t know who owns the exposed database in question. The data is related to Cook County, home to the city of Chicago and which has 5.1 million residents (making it the second most populous county in the U.S., behind Los Angeles county), they said. “On January 29th, 2021, the Cook County Bureau of Technology reached out to us to inform us that the server did not belong to the Cook County government,” said researchers with Website Planet in an update on Jan. 31. “The owner of the server was still unknown as of that day.”