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 Russian hacking group Coldriver could be behind the leak of Hard Brexit plans orchestrated by ex-MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove
A 'Very English Coop (sic) d'Etat' Emails between leading pro-Brexit figures in the UK have seemingly been stolen and leaked online by what could be a Kremlin cyberespionage team.…
Purporting to publish leaked emails of pro-Brexit leadership in the UK, a new site's operations have been traced to Russian cyber-threat actors, Google says.
The Versus Market, one of the most popular English-speaking criminal darknet markets, is shutting down after discovering a severe exploit that could have allowed access to its database and exposed the IP address of its servers. [...]
Yet another data-extortion cybercrime operation has appeared on the darknet named 'RansomHouse' where threat actors publish evidence of stolen files and leak data of organizations that refuse to make a ransom payment. [...]