Blog

Blog, Data Breach, elasticsearch May 8, 2020

PADI Certified Divers Records Exposed in a Misconfiguration Incident

On May 6th I have identified an open and unprotected Elasticsearch server that appeared to contain registration details for US-based divers certified by PADI, Professional Association of Diving Instructions. Cluster contained 2,313,197 records with the…

Like this story? Please share it!

Blog, Data Security Education, spammers April 14, 2020

SMS Spam Operation Rebrands, Continues to Leak Customer Information

Earlier this year, I discovered that SMS marketing firm, Rocket Text (rocket-text.com), failed to secure its Mongo database exposing just over 63 million customer emails and phone numbers. Rocket Text, formerly known as ApexSMS, first…

Like this story? Please share it!

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…

Like this story? Please share it!

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…

Like this story? Please share it!

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…

Like this story? Please share it!

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…

Like this story? Please share it!

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…

Like this story? Please share it!

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….

Like this story? Please share it!

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…

Like this story? Please share it!

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…

Like this story? Please share it!

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…

Like this story? Please share it!

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…

Like this story? Please share it!

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…

Like this story? Please share it!

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…

Like this story? Please share it!

Blog, Data Breach, database, elasticsearch, Uncategorized August 23, 2019

Fundraising Platform Exposes 7.5 Million Records Online

Online fundraising is a growing industry that has raised many billions of dollars for worthy causes from around the street to around the world. The concept of small donations from many people can have a…

Like this story? Please share it!

Blog, Data Breach, database August 20, 2019

UK Property Preservation Company Has Data Exposed Online by 3rd Party

On July 30th I discovered an open database that contained 18,667 records including names, account numbers, transaction details, user credentials, and admin passwords. Upon further investigation I was able to connect the data to a…

Like this story? Please share it!

Blog, Data Breach, ipv6, mongodb August 14, 2019

Home and Family Job Search Engine Exposed Its Database

FamilaFacil, a Madrid-based home and family job search platform, has exposed its MongoDB database with details on their users and candidates. This was the first time I discovered an unprotected instance sitting in IPv6 environment…

Like this story? Please share it!

Blog, Data Breach, database, elasticsearch August 12, 2019

Microfinance Agency Exposed Thousands of Customer Records

In another Elasticsearch misconfiguration incident Credia.ge, a Tbilisi-based (Georgia) agency, exposed personal and loan information for thousands of its customers. I have identified the publicly available Elasticsearch cluster on August 3rd, however, according to Shodan…

Like this story? Please share it!

Blog, Data Breach, Data Security Education, mongodb August 8, 2019

Sex Sells! Spanish Chain of “Men’s Clubs” Exposed Its Database

On August 4th I discovered an open and unprotected MongoDB database which appeared to be part of a Spanish company managing a chain of “men’s clubs” across the country. IP with the database in question…

Like this story? Please share it!

Blog, Data Breach, database, elasticsearch August 7, 2019

Leadership for Educational Equity Exposes 3.69 Million Members Online

On July 26th discovered a non password protected elastic data set that contained 5.2 million documents in total. Immediately, I knew this information should not be publicly accessible and began trying to identify the ownership….

Like this story? Please share it!