All news with #aws s3 tag

🔒 Amazon Web Services has added a compute checksum operation to S3 Batch Operations, enabling large-scale verification of stored datasets without restoring or downloading objects. You can submit a manifest or target a bucket with prefix/suffix filters, select algorithms such as SHA-256, MD5, CRC32C and others, and receive a detailed integrity report when the job completes. This capability complements S3's built-in validation and simplifies compliance, preservation, and accuracy checks across all storage classes and object sizes.

🛠 AWS now supports resilience testing for S3 Express One Zone using AWS Fault Injection Service (FIS), enabling simulated network disruptions that cause data plane requests to timeout for directory buckets. The FIS network disruption action is included in the AZ Availability: Power Interruption scenario and is available in all Regions where the storage class is offered. You can run experiments via the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or the FIS API to validate monitoring, recovery procedures, and improve application resilience; consult FIS pricing for cost details.

🔒 This AWS blog explains how security teams can run malware analysis in the cloud while complying with AWS policies and minimizing risk. It recommends an architecture that uses an isolated VPC with no internet egress, ephemeral EC2 detonation hosts accessed via AWS Systems Manager Session Manager, and secure S3 storage via VPC gateway endpoints with encryption. The post emphasizes strong IAM and SCP guardrails, immutable hosts, automated teardown, centralized logging, and monitoring with CloudTrail and GuardDuty to maintain visibility and lifecycle control.

🔒 This second part of the guide examines three AWS file‑sharing mechanisms — CloudFront signed URLs, an Amazon VPC endpoint service backed by a custom application, and S3 Access Points — contrasting their security, cost, protocol, and operational trade‑offs. It highlights CloudFront’s edge caching and WAF/Shield integration for low‑latency public delivery, PrivateLink for fully private TCP connectivity, and Access Points for scalable IAM‑based S3 access control. The post emphasizes choosing or combining solutions based on access patterns, compliance, and budget.

🔐 This post by Swapnil Singh (updated July 28, 2025) compares AWS file-sharing options and explains security and cost trade-offs to help architects choose the right approach. Part 1 focuses on AWS Transfer Family, Transfer Family web apps, S3 pre-signed URLs, and a serverless pre-signed URL pattern (API Gateway + Lambda), outlining strengths, limitations, and pricing considerations. It emphasizes requirements gathering—access patterns, protocols, security, operations, and business constraints—and presents a decision matrix and high-level guidance for selecting a solution.

🔓 On August 28, 2018 the UpGuard Cyber Risk team discovered a publicly readable Amazon S3 bucket named tppcf containing roughly 2GB of campaign files belonging to the Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund (TPPCF). The data included call lists with full names and phone numbers for about 527,000 individuals, along with strategy documents, call scripts, and marketing assets. UpGuard notified TPPCF on October 1; permissions were briefly set to allow global authenticated users and then removed by October 5. The incident illustrates how cloud misconfiguration can expose sensitive political microtargeting data and create significant privacy risks.

🔓 UpGuard Research discovered a publicly accessible Amazon S3 bucket containing detailed consumer data attributed to Tetrad, including files derived from Experian Mosaic, Claritas/PRIZM, and client-supplied datasets covering over 120 million U.S. household records. The exposure included full names, addresses, gender, Mosaic codes, and retailer account and purchase information. UpGuard notified Tetrad in early February and, after repeated contact, the company removed public access and secured the bucket. The dataset's breadth raises significant privacy and targeted-risk concerns for individuals and communities.

🔒 UpGuard Research discovered a publicly accessible AWS S3 bucket containing roughly 60 GB of MSSQL backups uploaded by a Spartan Technology employee, exposing South Carolina justice-system records spanning 2008–2018. The dataset included about 5.2 million arrest-event rows, tens of millions of related records, and sensitive PII such as names, dates of birth, driver’s license numbers and roughly 17,000 Social Security numbers. Permissions included the "AuthenticatedUsers" group, enabling broad access; Spartan removed public access the same day after notification.

🔓 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.

🔎 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.

🔓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.

🔒 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.

🔓 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.

🛡️ 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 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.

🔓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.

🔓 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.

🔓 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 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.

🔓 On October 3, 2017 UpGuard researcher Chris Vickery discovered a publicly accessible Amazon S3 bucket belonging to National Credit Federation containing 111 GB of internal and customer records. The repository included scanned IDs, Social Security card images, full credit reports from Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion, personalized credit blueprints, and full bank and card numbers. National Credit Federation secured the bucket after notification and UpGuard found no evidence of theft in this report. The case underscores the necessity of validating cloud storage permissions and continuously monitoring third-party risk.