19.6 Billion Files Are Sitting Open on the Internet. No Password Required
19.6 Billion files are exposed in misconfigured cloud buckets, including 685K credential files and nearly 1M database dumps. There’s a comfortable myth most people carry around: that the data they hand to companies is locked somewhere safe. Researchers at Mysterium VPN just ran the numbers, and the numbers disagree. Across 535,480 publicly listable cloud storage […]
There’s a comfortable myth most people carry around: that the data they hand to companies is locked somewhere safe. Researchers at Mysterium VPN just ran the numbers, and the numbers disagree. Across 535,480 publicly listable cloud storage buckets on Amazon S3, Google Cloud, Azure, DigitalOcean, and Alibaba, they counted 19.6 billion files accessible to anyone with a browser and a URL. No login. No exploit. Just a web request.
The research team analyzed bucket metadata captured in March 2026, categorizing files by type and filename. They didn’t access or download any content. They didn’t need to. The presence of these file types in open storage is the finding, and it’s bad enough on its own.
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