Dow Jones Watchlist, containing politically expose persons, the companies they are mentioned along with, their colleagues and relatives, international and internal government sanction lists, records citing Federal agencies and law enforcement sources, notorious criminals, got exposed and could be freely indexed. Some authorised company has compromised about 2.4 million records keeping the database on a server unprotected with a password.

Dow Jones gives no commentaries on who the source of the incident is and whether the U.S. and European regulators are informed of the details.

The watchlist is created to identify high risk clients who could be under sanctions or investigation linked to fraudulent activity or terrorism. Officials and financial entities use the database to consider financing of particular businesses.

Dow Jones has already faced a cloud storage misconfiguration before, which led to the information leakage of 2.2 million people, there were The Wall Street Journal subscribers among them.