So what did they do with all if this data by the way this is the data of over 2000 Journalists, Youtubers, content creators and influencers. Okay what they did was they put it all up on their website in an unencrypted plain text spreadsheet not just that they actually put a link to the document for anyone and everyone to download to view the contents. to make matters worse they were first informed (as far as we know) about this document around a month ago and when did they remove it OH about 3 days ago.
This is a monumental data breach one that has probably never happened before the hackers didn't even have to hack the system all they had to do was click on a live link and hey presto they had all the data ready for the reading.
I think the reason it's not being talked about too much is the lawyers have told them not to as you can imagine the ESA is in a massive world of legal crap right now this is going to cost them a shed load of cash, I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up killing them off. If you have anything to do with the ESA I would say RUN, run away as fast as you can.
The ESA have said:
They are actually calling it an accident, it wasn't an accident it was incompetence and as far as I know it was after they made that statement that it came out that it had been mentioned to them a month ago, so much for them immediately took steps, a month is a pretty long time. Also it's not just America that it effects, as the likes of EU journalists like the BBC and the list was available to EU citizens so it breaks the GDPR rules, so they can expects some hefty fines from Europe too and I expect other parts of the world.“ESA was made aware of a website vulnerability that led to the contact list of registered journalists attending E3 being made public. Once notified, we immediately took steps to protect that data and shut down the site, which is no longer available. We regret this this occurrence and have put measures in place to ensure it will not occur again.”
The ESA is not having a particularly good time of it right now.