Data leaks can expose passwords, personal records, and business secrets, enabling identity theft, fraud, extortion, and follow-on cyberattacks.
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Background for this topic.
Leak is the unauthorized disclosure or exposure of information to people or systems not meant to receive it. It may be deliberate or accidental and can involve personal data, credentials, API keys, source code, trade secrets, or internal documents. A leak can result from theft and publication, an employee sending data to the wrong recipient, or an exposed cloud storage bucket, database, log, repository, or backup. The term describes the exposure, not necessarily how attackers obtained it; reporting may refer to both confirmed disclosure and suspected exposure.
Security teams should establish what data was accessible, to whom, and for how long, while distinguishing evidence of access from mere exposure. Exposed passwords, tokens, and keys should be revoked or rotated quickly, and affected systems checked for reuse or further access. Personal or regulated data may trigger privacy and reporting obligations, while leaked proprietary material can require legal and threat-intelligence monitoring. Prevention includes least-privilege access, secret scanning, safe sharing controls, encryption where appropriate, and monitoring for misconfigured public resources.
The Brain Cipher ransomware gang has begun to leak documents stolen in an attack on Rhode Island's "RIBridges" social services platform. [...]
The State of Rhode Island has confirmed that cybercriminals have begun publishing data stolen from its social services portal, the RIBridges system
Data pilfered as miscreants roamed affected workstations The US Department of the Treasury has admitted that miscreants were in its systems, accessing documents in what has been called a "major incident."…
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has proposed updates to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) to secure patients' health data following a surge in massive healthcare data leaks. [...]
Federal authorities have arrested and indicted a 20-year-old U.S. Army soldier on suspicion of being Kiberphant0m, a cybercriminal who has been selling and leaking sensitive customer call records stolen earlier this year from AT&T and Verizon. As first reported by KrebsOnSecurity last month, the accused is a communications specialist who was recently stationed in South Korea.