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.
A threat actor has leaked data — purportedly, samples of Telus employee payroll data and source code — on a hacker site.
Canada's second-largest telecom, TELUS is investigating a potential data breach after a threat actor shared samples online of what appears to be employee data. The threat actor subsequently shared screenshots apparently showing private source code repositories and payroll records held by the company. [...]
Some employees' personal data was leaked, but the company responded swiftly to a socially engineered incident that gained access to legitimate employee login credentials.
Settles lawsuit with two states after wider leak that affected millions A DNA diagnostics company will pay $400,000 and tighten its security in the wake of a 2021 attack where criminals broke into its network and swiped personal data on over two million people from a nine-year-old "legacy" database the company forgot it had.…