Bikash Baria, Co-Founder Of, FireCompass warned that disinformation efforts stretch far beyond just posting or sharing fake news on social media.

“Based on FireCompass’ internet-wide monitoring data, there are currently more than 5 million open, vulnerable databases, which include usernames, passwords, emails, and personal details,” he said. “When this data gets in the hands of hackers, it can be used to send personalized and targeted misinformation to skew results.”

He added, “In addition, breaking into the ‘information supply chain’ is not a challenge for hackers. In fact, more than 90 percent of organizations have at least one major security vulnerability, which can be used to a break-in, steal, and corrupt data.”

FireCompass study on “ US Election Misinformation”  finds how easy or hard it is to use cyber attacks as a part of the misinformation campaign to influence the election.

The study collected, indexed, and analyzed publicly available open-source data for the last few years. Data consists of Web Applications (1 Million+ Alexa Web Sites), 100K Top Mobile Apps, 10+ Billion Leaked Credentials Records on Dark Web, 180 Million Ports, and Services. 

>> You can read the full report here.