More than 220 million records containing passport and travel information for airline passengers and crew who travelled to and from Vietnam were later found to have been exposed due to a cloud database configuration error.

Tech news outlet TechRadar reported on Aug. 8, local time, that security firm Kinryu Labs found an Elasticsearch cluster in June that stored Advanced Passenger Information System (APIS) data linked to Vietnam. Access was blocked from the public internet, but the internal data could be reached through a separate cloud route and default authentication credentials. The archive comprised 29 indices and was about 107 gigabytes in size.

The records were created from January 2017 to April 2026. They included names, dates of birth, nationalities, genders, passport and travel document numbers and expiry dates, and countries of issuance. They also contained detailed travel information such as airlines and flights, departure, arrival and transit airports, seats and baggage reference information.

The two largest indices stored 210,318,069 passenger records and 10,465,631 crew records, for a total of 220,783,700. This was travel records rather than a count of people, and repeat travel by the same person could have been counted more than once. It included multiple nationalities such as South Korean, Canadian, Chinese and New Zealand, and it was not data from a single airline.

The operator of the database was not identified. Researchers only determined that the server was in an IP range assigned to Viettel in Hanoi. The researchers notified Vietnamese authorities, incident response agencies and relevant airlines on June 3, and the database was blocked five days later on June 8. Singapore Airlines' security team also worked with related organisations in the response.

So far, no evidence has been found that the data was sold on the dark web or used for crime. But because access log audits and forensic investigations were not carried out, it remains unclear whether a third party accessed it before the researchers.