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.
The stolen firewall data is thorough but more than 2 years old now, meaning that most organizations following even basic security practices face minimal risk, hopefully.
Competition hots up with Ivanti over who can have the worst start to a year Fortinet has confirmed that previous analyses of records leaked by the Belsen Group are indeed genuine FortiGate configs stolen during a zero-day raid in 2022.…
Actively Targeted Zero Day Patched; Warning Issued After Device Configurations LeakFortinet has released patches to fix a zero-day vulnerability being actively exploited by attackers. Separately, researchers are warning customers to review their infrastructure after attackers leaked configuration details - including firewall rules and plaintext VPN passwords - for 15,000 devices.
Pastes allegedly stolen documents on leak site with £600K demand Another year and yet another UK local authority has been pwned by a ransomware crew. This time it's Gateshead Council in North East England at the hands of the Medusa group.…
The leak likely comes from a zero-day exploit affecting Fortinet’s products
A new hacking group has leaked the configuration files, IP addresses, and VPN credentials for over 15,000 FortiGate devices for free on the dark web, exposing a great deal of sensitive technical information to other cybercriminals. [...]
RansomHub, Play and Akira Appear to Dominate; Numerous Newcomers Join the FrayWhile ransomware groups' data-leak sites regularly lie, if taken at face value, in December 2024 they collectively listed the largest number of victims ever seen in a one-month period, dominated by RansomHub, Play and Akira operations, plus a bevy of newcomers, researchers report.
PLUS: Data broker leak reveals extent of info trading; Hot new ransomware gang might be all AI, no bark; and more Infosec in brief Gravy Analytics, a vendor of location intelligence info for marketers which reached a settlement with US authorities last year over its alleged unlawful sale of location, has reportedly been hacked – potentially exposing millions of smartphone users.…