Data leaks can expose passwords, personal records, and business secrets, enabling identity theft, fraud, extortion, and follow-on cyberattacks.
Search across headline titles and summaries.
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.
Software teams need to follow security best practices to eliminate the leak of secrets, as threat actors increase their scanning for configuration and repository files.
A employee at Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI leaked a private key on GitHub that for the past two months could have allowed anyone to query private xAI large language models (LLMs) which appear to have been custom made for working with internal data from Musk's companies, including SpaceX, Tesla and Twitter/X, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.
The chat infrastructure and data-leak site of the notorious ransomware-as-a-service group has been inactive since March 31, according to security vendors.
Cybersecurity researchers have revealed that RansomHub's online infrastructure has "inexplicably" gone offline as of April 1, 2025, prompting concerns among affiliates of the ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation
Threat actors are intensifying internet-wide scanning for Git configuration files that can reveal sensitive secrets and authentication tokens used to compromise cloud services and source code repositories. [...]
PLUS: Microsoft fixes messes China used to attack it; Mitre adds ESXi advice; Employee-tracking screenshots leak; and more! Infosec in brief Samsung has warned that some of its Galaxy devices store passwords in plaintext.…