All news in category “Incidents and Data Breaches”

🔍 Fraudsters are promoting hundreds of polished fake gaming sites across Discord and other social platforms, falsely claiming partnerships with influencers and offering a $2,500 'promo code' to lure users. Visitors create free accounts to play sleek casino-style games (for example gamblerbeast[.]com's B-Ball Blitz), but cashouts are blocked and victims are prompted for a cryptocurrency 'verification deposit' and repeated payments. Investigators, including a Discord researcher and the threat-hunting firm Silent Push, linked a shared chat API key to at least 1,270 active domains and found centralized wallets, AI-assisted support, and network-wide tracking that make these scaled scams efficient and hard to report.

🔒 UpGuard researchers discovered on August 30, 2017 a publicly accessible Amazon S3 bucket named “mcs-puppet” containing seventy-two .tgz backup archives that included Puppet manifests, configuration files, keys, and credentials tied to Viacom. The repository exposed AWS access and secret keys, GPG decryption keys, and scripts referencing services such as Docker, Jenkins, Splunk, and New Relic. UpGuard notified Viacom on August 31, and the exposure was secured within hours. The incident demonstrates how cloud misconfigurations can reveal master provisioning controls and enable widespread infrastructure compromise.

🔓 UpGuard discovered an Amazon S3 bucket owned by LocalBlox that was publicly accessible, exposing a 1.2 TB ndjson archive containing approximately 48 million personal profiles. The dataset aggregated names, addresses, dates of birth, scraped LinkedIn and Facebook content, Twitter handles, and other identifiers used to build psychographic profiles. UpGuard notified LocalBlox and the bucket was secured on February 28, 2018. The incident highlights how a simple cloud misconfiguration can compromise consumer privacy and enable targeted influence at scale.

🔓 UpGuard disclosed that an unsecured Medcall Healthcare Advisors Amazon S3 bucket exposed roughly 7 GB of sensitive information, including PDF intake forms, CSV files containing full Social Security numbers, and 715 recorded patient-doctor and operator calls. The bucket was publicly readable and writable with an 'Everyone - Full Control' ACL and was taken offline after UpGuard notified Medcall. The case underscores the danger of vendor misconfiguration and third-party exposure of protected health information.

🔓 Level One Robotics left 157 GB of sensitive customer, employee, and corporate files accessible via an unrestricted rsync server, exposing CAD drawings, factory layouts, robotic configurations, NDAs, identity documents, and banking records for over 100 manufacturing clients. UpGuard discovered the exposure on July 1, 2018 and began outreach on July 5; after contact on July 9, Level One remediated the server by July 10. The incident underscores third- and fourth-party supply-chain risk and the need to restrict file-transfer services by IP and authentication, enforce vendor security standards, and maintain rapid exposure-response procedures.

🔒 UpGuard researchers discovered a publicly accessible MongoDB database belonging to Neoclinical, exposing profiles for 37,170 users in Australia and New Zealand. Records included names, contact details, geocoordinates, dates of birth and structured health-screening answers that revealed diagnoses and treatments. UpGuard notified the company and AWS; access was removed on July 26. The exposure underscores the need for proper access controls and rapid incident response.

🔓 The UpGuard Cyber Team discovered a publicly accessible GitLab repository belonging to AggregateIQ that exposed code, tools, and credentials used in political data operations. The leak includes an apparent campaign platform called Ripon, state configuration files, voicemail scripts, and integrations for services like Twilio and Facebook. Exposed keys, tokens, and AWS credentials raise risks of misuse and highlight ties between AIQ and Cambridge Analytica that warrant further investigation.

🔓On October 11, 2018 UpGuard discovered that an Amazon S3 bucket named "pinapp2" exposed 73 GB of data belonging to Pocket iNet. The downloadable "tech" folder contained plaintext administrative passwords, AWS secret keys, network configuration files, inventory lists, and photographs of hardware and towers. Pocket iNet was notified the same day and secured the exposure on October 19, 2018. The incident highlights how misconfigured S3 ACLs and poor credential hygiene can place critical infrastructure at risk.

🔍 AggregateIQ's public repository exposed sophisticated ad and tracking tools linked to political campaigns. The Saga suite automates Facebook ad scraping, performance reconciliation, and asset backup, while Monarch provides pixel-based tracking (Jewel, Peasant) and a microservice stack (Peon) for event ingestion and enrichment. The codebase included credentials and configs enabling fine-grained targeting, though working user datasets were not present. The exposure raises significant privacy and electoral concerns.

🔓 UpGuard identified an Amazon S3 bucket tied to iPR Software that publicly exposed over a terabyte of files, including a 17 GB MongoDB backup. The collection contained 477,000 media contacts, approximately 35,000 hashed passwords, client marketing assets, internal PR strategy documents, and credentials for Google, Twitter, and a MongoDB host. UpGuard notified iPR in October 2019; public access was removed in late November after follow-up and media engagement.

🛡️ UpGuard analyst Chris Vickery discovered a publicly exposed S3 file repository containing credentials and SSH keys tied to systems used by US geospatial intelligence contractors. The plaintext data included access tokens and administrative credentials that could enable entry to systems handling Top Secret-level data. NGA secured the bucket rapidly after notification; Booz Allen Hamilton responded later. UpGuard preserved the dataset at government request.

📂 UpGuard's analysis of exposed development repositories from AggregateIQ details source code, backups, and credentials tied to multiple pro-Brexit organizations. The findings show WordPress backups, API keys, Stripe secrets, and scripts used to build and contact supporter lists, with administrative accounts linking AIQ staff to sites such as Vote Leave, Change Britain, and the DUP. Misuse of the exposed assets could have allowed large-scale data access or payment compromise.

🔓 The UpGuard Cyber Risk Team discovered a publicly accessible Amazon S3 bucket that contained detailed configuration spreadsheets appearing to describe GoDaddy infrastructure running in the AWS cloud. The files included over 24,000 hostnames and 41 configuration fields per system, plus modeled financials and apparent AWS discounting—information useful for targeted attacks or competitive intelligence. GoDaddy closed the exposure after notification; no credentials were found, but the incident highlights the severe consequences of cloud misconfiguration at scale.

🔒 A misconfigured Amazon S3 repository administered by NICE Systems exposed names, addresses, account details and PINs tied to Verizon customers; UpGuard estimated up to 14 million affected while Verizon disputed a 6 million figure. The publicly accessible bucket contained daily voice-log files and large text archives with unmasked fields such as PIN and CustCode, alongside call analytics metadata. UpGuard notified Verizon in June 2017 and remediation followed, but the incident underscores the severity of third-party cloud misconfigurations and vendor-managed data risk.

🔓UpGuard discovered 111 GB of internal customer records from National Credit Federation stored in a publicly accessible Amazon S3 bucket, including names, addresses, dates of birth, scanned driver’s licenses and Social Security cards, full bank and credit card numbers, and complete credit reports. The repository contained personalized credit blueprints and videos showing employee access. UpGuard notified the company, which promptly secured the bucket. The case highlights the need for rigorous cloud permission controls and continuous configuration monitoring.

🔎 The UpGuard Cyber Risk Team details a public discovery of AggregateIQ repositories that exposed sophisticated political targeting tools. The report highlights project families Monarch and Saga, describing ad-scraping scripts, pixel trackers, and ingestion services that link Facebook ad activity to web behavior. Exposed credentials and AWS assets amplify privacy and oversight concerns.

🔓 On September 27, 2017, UpGuard researcher Chris Vickery discovered an Amazon S3 bucket at the AWS subdomain "inscom" that was publicly accessible and contained 47 entries with three downloadable files. One download, an .ova virtual appliance named "ssdev," included a virtual hard drive with partitions and metadata labeled Top Secret and NOFORN. The exposed assets also contained private keys, hashed passwords, a ReadMe referencing the Pentagon cloud project Red Disk, and a classification-training snapshot. UpGuard notified INSCOM and the repository was promptly secured.

🔐 UpGuard discovered a publicly accessible Amazon S3 bucket tied to the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) that contained clearly classified material, including an Oracle virtual appliance (.ova) with partitions labeled Top Secret and NOFORN. Downloadable artifacts included a plaintext ReadMe referencing the Red Disk cloud platform and a .jar used for intelligence tagging. The exposure also revealed private keys and hashed passwords linked to a third-party contractor. UpGuard notified INSCOM and the bucket was secured to prevent further access.

🔒 UpGuard researchers discovered a publicly accessible Amazon S3 bucket belonging to iPR Software, containing backups, internal documentation, and a dataset of approximately 477,000 media contacts. The collection included over 35,000 hashed passwords, a 17 GB MongoDB backup that expands substantially when restored, and credentials for services such as Twitter and a MongoDB hosting provider. UpGuard notified iPR on October 24 after detecting the bucket on October 15, and public access was removed on November 26; the exposure underscores risks from misconfigured cloud storage for vendors managing client data.

🔒 UpGuard identified an unsecured AWS S3 bucket containing MSSQL backups linked to Spartan Technology, exposing records from 2008–2018. The dataset comprised roughly 60 GB across four backup files and documented about 5.2 million arrest events and approximately 26,000 unique defendants; around 17,000 unique Social Security numbers were present. Victim and witness records included names and phone numbers only. After notification on November 19, 2019, Spartan promptly removed public access and worked with researchers to secure the data.