All news with #breach tag

Misconfigured NICE Systems S3 Exposed Verizon Customer Data

🔒 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.

Viacom Cloud Leak Exposed Master Controls and Keys

🔒 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.

AggregateIQ Repositories Expose Multiple Brexit Sites

📂 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.

Amazon Engineer Exposed Credentials via Public GitHub Repo

🔒 UpGuard discovered a public GitHub repository on 13 January 2020 containing an Amazon Web Services engineer’s personal identity documents and numerous system credentials. The repository included AWS key pairs (including a file named rootkey.csv), API tokens, private keys, passwords, logs, and customer-related templates. UpGuard reported the exposure to AWS Security within hours and the repository was secured the same day. The incident highlights how rapid leak detection can prevent accidental disclosures from escalating.

Medico Inc. S3 Misconfiguration Exposes Patient Data

🔓 Medico Inc. left an Amazon S3 bucket publicly accessible, exposing nearly 14,000 documents (approximately 1.7GB) that included medical records, insurance claims, legal files, and internal business data. The UpGuard Data Breach Research Team discovered the bucket on June 20, 2019, and Medico closed it within hours after notification. The dataset contained unredacted PII such as SSNs, bank account numbers, and payment card data, and also included plaintext credentials that could enable further compromise.

HR Data Exposure: How Employees and Clients Are Affected

🔒 UpGuard’s Cyber Risk Research team discovered and secured a public GitHub exposure containing sensitive employee and customer data belonging to OneHalf, a business process outsourcing firm in the APAC region. The principal artifact was the HRIS project, including a 1.2MB database dump (hrisdb-02012018.sql) with detailed personal records for roughly 250 employees, extensive medical histories, emergency contacts, and 300 usernames with plaintext passwords. A related repo, ohserviceform, listed 28 client companies and plaintext banking account numbers, increasing the risk of financial fraud. UpGuard notified OneHalf and the repositories were secured by August 22, 2018.

Leakzone Elasticsearch Exposure Reveals Visitor IP Logs

🔎 UpGuard discovered an unauthenticated Elasticsearch index containing roughly 22 million web-request records, of which about 95% referenced leakzone.net. The logs included client IP addresses, destination domains, request sizes, geolocation data and ISP metadata, spanning June 25 to discovery on July 18, with about one million requests per day. Analysis found extensive use of public proxies and clustered VPN exit nodes, alongside many one-off IPs likely representing direct users. The dataset raises privacy and operational concerns for visitors, service operators, and investigators.

Top Secret INSCOM Data Exposed via Public AWS S3 Repository

🔓 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.

Public Exposure of Tetrad Consumer Data Sets in S3

🔓 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.

AggregateIQ GitLab Leak Reveals Political Targeting Tools

🔓 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.

Google Files Lawsuit to Dismantle BadBox 2.0 Botnet

🔒 Google has filed a lawsuit in New York federal court targeting the operators of the BadBox 2.0 botnet, which compromised over 10 million uncertified devices running the Android Open Source Project. In partnership with HUMAN Security and Trend Micro, Google’s Ad Traffic Quality team identified preinstalled malware used for large-scale ad fraud and other illicit activity. Google updated Play Protect to automatically block BadBox-associated apps and is coordinating with the FBI to further disrupt the criminal operation.

Alteryx Cloud Leak Exposes Data on 123M Households

🔒 UpGuard discovered an Amazon S3 bucket at the subdomain 'alteryxdownload' that was misconfigured to allow any AWS 'Authenticated Users' to download its contents. The repository included Alteryx software and a 36 GB ConsumerView dataset from Experian containing 123 million household records and 248 fields. A separate file held public 2010 US Census data. Alteryx secured the bucket after notification, underscoring vendor and cloud configuration risk.

Nokia/MTS Telecom Inventory Exposure Reveals SORM Data

🔒 UpGuard discovered and secured a 1.7 TB publicly accessible storage repository that contained detailed documentation of telecommunications infrastructure across Russia, including schematics, administrative credentials, email archives and photographs. The dataset, hosted on an rsync server, appears to relate primarily to projects by Nokia and carrier MTS. Files included installation instructions and images for SORM interception hardware, raising significant operational and national-security risks. UpGuard notified Nokia and access was closed within days.

Misconfigured rsync Leak Exposes One Million Education Leads

🔓 UpGuard's Cyber Risk Team discovered an exposed rsync repository tied to subsidiaries of Blue Chair LLC, including Target Direct Marketing, that revealed PII for over one million individuals seeking higher education information. The publicly accessible server included daily MySQL backups and website files, with names, emails, phone numbers and education-related lead fields. The exposure resulted from an rsync misconfiguration and highlights the need for strong vendor risk controls, data retention policies and restricted backup access.

Exposed rsync Server Leaked Oklahoma Securities Data

🔓 UpGuard's Data Breach Research team discovered and secured a publicly accessible rsync storage server containing data belonging to the Oklahoma Department of Securities. The exposure included approximately 3 TB and millions of files spanning 1986–2016, including email archives, virtual machine images, system credentials, and personal records. UpGuard identified the host via Shodan, notified state officials, and public access was removed the same day.

Massive CENTCOM/PACOM Cloud Leak Exposes Billions of Data

🔍 UpGuard discovered three publicly accessible Amazon S3 buckets associated with CENTCOM and PACOM that contained a vast corpus of scraped internet posts. One bucket alone held an estimated 1.8 billion records spanning 2009–2017, including news articles, forum threads, comment sections and social media posts. Configuration files and folders referenced a contractor, VendorX, and projects named Outpost and Coral, while Lucene indexes indicated the data was organized for search. UpGuard notified the Defense Department and the buckets were secured.

PQE Data Exposure Reveals Critical Infrastructure Details

⚠️ The UpGuard Cyber Risk Team discovered a publicly accessible rsync repository belonging to Texas-based Power Quality Engineering (PQE) that exposed sensitive electrical infrastructure data for clients including Dell, Oracle, and Texas Instruments. Up to 205 GB of reports, schematics, infrared imagery and a plaintext file of internal passwords were downloadable. The exposure, discovered on July 6, 2017 and remediated after notification, illustrates vendor risk and misconfigured services. Recommended mitigations included restricting rsync access, enforcing authentication and network ACLs, and implementing continuous vendor monitoring.

Cloud Leak Exposes Millions of Dow Jones Customer Records

🔒 A cloud-based file repository owned by Dow Jones & Company was discovered publicly accessible, exposing sensitive personal and financial details for millions of customers. UpGuard researcher Chris Vickery located an AWS S3 bucket under the subdomain dj-skynet on May 30, 2017; Dow Jones secured the repository on June 6 after notification. Exposed material included names, addresses, account identifiers, login emails, the last four digits of credit cards, and 1.6 million entries tied to Dow Jones Risk and Compliance products, illustrating the dangers of cloud misconfiguration.

Data Warehouse Vendor Publicly Exposed a Terabyte of Backups

🔒 An UpGuard researcher discovered three publicly accessible Amazon S3 buckets tied to Attunity, a data integration vendor now part of Qlik. One bucket contained a sampled terabyte of backups, including roughly 750 GB of compressed email archives and OneDrive backups with system credentials, project documents, client lists, and employee PII. The researcher notified the vendor on May 16, 2019, and public access was removed the following day. The incident highlights how backup misconfigurations can expose credentials and sensitive corporate and customer data.

Accenture Cloud Buckets Exposed Sensitive Credentials

🔒 UpGuard discovered four publicly accessible AWS S3 buckets belonging to Accenture, exposing API keys, certificates, decryption keys, plaintext passwords, and customer data associated with the Accenture Cloud Platform. The discovery was made in mid-September 2017 and reported to Accenture, which secured the buckets the following day. Exposed artifacts included master KMS keys, VPN credentials, logs, and private signing keys that could enable impersonation and secondary attacks against clients.