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Blog, Data Breach, elasticsearch March 19, 2020

A UK-based Security Company Seemed To Have Inadvertently Exposed Its ‘Leaks Database’ with 5B+ Records

On March 16th I have found an unprotected and thus publicly available Elasticsearch instance which appeared to be managed by a UK-based security company, according to the SSL certificate and reverse DNS records. The irony…

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Blog, Data Breach, database March 2, 2020

Free Wifi User Data Exposed in Multiple UK Train Stations

On February 14th I discovered a non-password protected database that contained a massive amount of records totaling 146 million. Upon further review I was able to see connections to what appeared to be free wifi…

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Data Breach, database February 18, 2020

FairBridge Inn & Suites Exposed Customer Booking Platform

Booking a hotel online is now so common that we consumers never give it a second thought when traveling. We enter our information, provide payment details and then cross our fingers. Unfortunately once we provide…

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Blog, Data Breach, database, mongodb February 13, 2020

US non-profit for international study exposes private documents of thousands of students: report

The Institute of International Education (IIE), a US nonprofit that focuses on foreign exchange study and scholarship, exposed a database on the web containing thousands of logs and links to private student documents. The database…

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Blog, database, Uncategorized February 11, 2020

Estee Lauder Exposed 440 Million Records Online

On January 30th I discovered a non-password protected database that contained a massive amount of records totaling 440,336,852. Upon further review I was able to see connections to New York based cosmetic company Estée Lauder. I…

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Blog, Data Breach, database February 4, 2020

Pabbly Email Marketing Exposes 51.2 Million Records Online

Email marketing is big business and many companies rely on emails to keep in contact with their customers or potential customers. In the modern world of over priced pay per click ads targeted email marketing…

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Blog, Data Breach, database January 13, 2020

Online Eyewear Websites Expose Data of 186k Customers

In October 2019 I discovered a database that contained 186,000 sales records and 40.4 million visitor IP addresses. From October 23rd, 2019 to January 13th, 2020 I sent multiple emails and left numerous voice messages….

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Data Breach, database, elasticsearch December 18, 2019

Honda Exposes Vehicle Owner Records on the Web

On December 11th, 2019, I have identified an open and unprotected Elasticsearch cluster with 976 millions of records which appeared to be part of Honda North America infrastructure, exposed online to anyone with a web browser….

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Data Breach, database, elasticsearch, Uncategorized November 13, 2019

Prank Call Service PrankDial Exposed 138 Million Records Online

On October 28th I discovered a non-password protected database that contained millions of log files. Upon further research, the records all contained information that identified PrankDial.com as the owner of the data. I immediately sent…

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Blog, Data Breach, database, elasticsearch October 28, 2019

2.59 Million Credit Card Transactions Exposed –

Two data incidents just months apart from each other. Back in February 2019 I found a database that belonged to a Nigerian based company. The first database contained over 8 million records. The representatives replied…

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Blog, Data Breach, elasticsearch October 22, 2019

Religious Website and Software Provider Leaks Customer and Credit Card Data for Many Months

Religious website service Clover Sites exposed customer data for at least 6-7 months and the dataset was found twice on two separate databases. On May 22nd I discovered and reported a data exposure incident involving…

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Data Breach, heartbeat, IoT, mongodb October 15, 2019

Whirlpool Exposed Database with Home Appliances Scan Results

On October 1st, I have found a rather unusual web interface of Heartbeat monitoring service. The open and publicly available instance contained a graph and description which immediately got my attention: Here you can analyze…

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Blog, Data Breach, Data Security Education October 11, 2019

When Test Data is Not Test Data

There is a growing trend among organizations and companies to simply deny that live production data is real. As a security researcher I often hear that everyone is a small start-up and all data is…

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Data Breach, elasticsearch September 26, 2019

Large Italian Online Shop Exposed Customers Details

On Sept 4th I have identified an open and unprotected Elasticsearch cluster containing sensitive details of customers of Calcioshop.it, popular online shop in Italy for football accessories. Database contained 408,995 records with information about Calcioshop customer…

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Data Breach, mongodb September 24, 2019

Mexican Online Bookstore Exposed Data – Again

On September 9th, I have discovered three (3) open and unprotected MongoDB instances which appeared to be part of Librería Porrúa, a long-established bookseller based in Mexico. This case would have been left unnoticed if I…

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Blog, Data Breach, database, elasticsearch September 24, 2019

Investment Research Company Exposed Subscribers, Credit Card Data, and Evidence of Ransomware

Way back in March, 2019 Security Discovery’s Bob Diachenko discovered a non-password protected database that contained 18,000 user names, mailing addresses, hashed passwords, and credit card information such as the last 4 digits of the…

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Blog, Data Breach, database, elasticsearch, Uncategorized September 19, 2019

Mattress Company Exposes 387k Customer Records Online

On September 5th I discovered a non-password protected database that contained 1 folder named “Customers”. Every file contained references to Verlo Mattress Factory and appeared to be customer data. Upon further investigation there were indications…

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database, mongodb September 17, 2019

Banking Trojan Database Exposed – Millions of Users At Risk

On July 5th I discovered two (!) open and publicly accessible MongoDB instances which appeared to be part of the GootKit network – one of the most advanced banking Trojans discovered in the wild in the…

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Data Breach, Data Security Education, elasticsearch September 13, 2019

Bold.com Exposed Its Internal Infrastructure

Bold.com, company behind popular solutions to help jobseekers find jobs, and help businesses find candidates – LiveCareer, Resume-Now, my Perfect Resume, Mighty Recruiter – inadvertently exposed part of its internal infrastructure used for project tracking and project…

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Blog, Data Breach, database, elasticsearch September 11, 2019

Auto Dealer Leads Network Exposed 198 Million Records Online

On August 19th I reported a non-password protected database that contained a massive 413GB of data and a total of 198 million records. The most shocking part was that I had seen this dataset several…

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