German car rental company Buchbinder exposed the personal information of over 3.1 million customers including federal ministry employees , diplomats , and celebrities , all of it stored within a ten terabytes MSSQL backup database left unsecured on the Internet . The German company runs a worldwide network of over 5000 car rental stations directed by partners and franchise holders , with clients from " IMPORTANT INFORMATION - Dear customers , we have been informed of a data leak that affected our systems , " Buchbinder 's notification says . " We are currently in the process of reviewing the matter and will come back to you shortly with more informations . "more than 100 countries . Buchbinder is currently investigating the security breach according to a notification displayed on the company 's website . After analyzing the open database , Nehls discovered that the German car rental company exposed the data of more than 3 million of its customers on the Internet as reported by c't and DIE ZEIT , with the stored data going back as far as 2003 . ;