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.
Short of rearchitecting hardware, the fix will seriously degrade performance Apple is having its own Meltdown/Spectre moment with a new side-channel vulnerability found in the architecture of Apple Silicon processors that gives malicious apps the ability to extract cryptographic keys. …
Microsoft confirmed that a memory leak introduced with the March 2024 Windows Server security updates is behind a widespread issue causing Windows domain controllers to crash. [...]
From a trickle to a flood, threats now seen as too great to ignore US government is urging state officials to band together to improve the cybersecurity of the country's water sector amid growing threats from foreign adversaries.…
Also down under, researchers find security-cleared workers leaking details of their gigs An Australian IT contractor has been sentenced to 30 months jail for ripping off the National Maritime Museum.…
Three cybersecurity researchers discovered close to 19 million plaintext passwords exposed on the public internet by misconfigured instances of Firebase, a Google platform for hosting databases, cloud computing, and app development. [...]
Victims Include at Least 70 Organizations Across 23 CountriesSecurity researchers say they've spotted a hacking campaign with a strong focus in Southeast Asia that could be the work of Chinese state hacking contractor iSoon, the company whose February internal data leak threw a spotlight on a network of private sector companies hacking on behalf of Beijing.
Dataset Leaked for Free; ShinyHunters Cybercrime Gang First Advertised It in 2021Data breach blast from the past: Data pertaining to 70 million individuals that the ShinyHunters gang claimed were AT&T customers has been leaked via a hacking forum, three years after criminals first offered it for sale. AT&T said the information didn't appear to have been stolen from its systems.
Review of Attacks Finds Inconsistent Data Leaks and Victim Naming, Broken PromisesRansomware groups hope threats are enough to sway victims so they don't have to follow through. For victims who pay ransoms, the results are almost guaranteed to be less than advertised - more akin to buying a pig in a poke than a contractual guarantee of service.
Telco reckons data is old, isn't from its systems More than 70 million records, allegedly stolen from AT&T in 2021, were dumped on a cybercrime forum at the weekend.…
LockBit ransomware gang claims 668GB of data it dumped online was stolen from South Africa's pension agency.
AT&T says a massive trove of data impacting 71 million people did not originate from its systems after a hacker leaked it on a cybercrime forum and claimed it was stolen in a 2021 breach of the company. [...]