This year has had a number of data breaches much like every other year. But the biggest one so far this year has been the breach at the First American Financial Corp. A record of 885 million records were exposed online by the end May this year. The data was eventually taken offline that same day, but peoples bank account details, social security digits, wire transactions, and mortgage data were all easily accessible on the servers of this company.

The upside to this is that this information was simply available on the First American’s Web site. Meaning that it was hard to tell if fraudsters were even aware of this. Indeed this particular breach of data wasn’t exactly an attack.

Ben Shoval, a real-estate developer, was looking at the site and noticed the files were all available. He notified security reporter Brian Krebs who later contacted First American Corporation about the breach.

He was notified that the exposure to data was likely due to a design defect from one of their production applications. Because it was something internal, the chances that data was leveraged is much lower.

Regardless, even if no real damages stemmed from this, there is still much to learn. If you ever notice something unusual, make a point of bringing it up. Especially if it's something to do with your own bank. While banks certainly put an effort to have the tightest security around, mishaps happen.