Misconfiguration exposes assets through unsafe settings, enabling unauthorized access or data loss; secure baselines, reviews, and least privilege reduce risk.
Search across headline titles and summaries.
Background for this topic.
Misconfiguration is an insecure or unintended setting in a system, application, network, cloud resource, or identity control. Examples include publicly accessible storage, default credentials, overly broad permissions, exposed management interfaces, unnecessary services, and weak encryption settings. Attackers can discover these conditions through scanning or by abusing access they already possess; depending on the asset and data involved, the result may be unauthorized access, data exposure, or expanded control of connected systems.
The main defense is to define and enforce secure configuration baselines: disable unused features, remove default accounts and secrets, restrict network exposure, apply least privilege, and protect sensitive data with appropriate access controls and encryption. Review configurations before deployment and monitor for drift afterward, including in infrastructure managed as code. Prioritize findings by internet exposure, privilege, data sensitivity, and exploitability, then verify that remediation actually restored the intended state.
Weekly headline count for the current query.
Shai-Hulud worm exploited GitHub Actions misconfiguration to poison shared cache, now project weighing nuclear option on unsolicited contributions
Publisher claims misconfigured Salesforce-hosted page leaked data Textbook giant McGraw Hill has landed on a ransomware crew's leak site after an alleged Salesforce-linked misconfiguration spilled 13.5 million records into the wild.…
And it's 'not unique to AWS,' researcher tells The Reg A critical misconfiguration in AWS's CodeBuild service allowed complete takeover of the cloud provider's own GitHub repositories and put every AWS environment in the world at risk, according to Wiz security researchers.…
AuraInspector automates the most common abuses and generates fixes for customers Mandiant has released an open source tool to help Salesforce admins detect misconfigurations that could expose sensitive data.…
Misconfigured servers are in, 0-days out Chinese espionage crew Ink Dragon has expanded its snooping activities into European government networks, using compromised servers to create illicit relay nodes for future operations.…
'Sustained focus on Western critical infrastructure' Russia's Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) is behind a years-long campaign targeting energy, telecommunications, and tech providers, stealing credentials and compromising misconfigured devices hosted on AWS to give the Kremlin's snoops persistent access to sensitive networks, according to Amazon's security boss.…
Risk list highlights misconfigs, supply chain failures, and singles out prompt injection in AI apps The Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) just published its top 10 categories of application risks for 2025, its first list since 2021. It found that while broken access control remains the top issue, security misconfiguration is a strong second, and software supply chain issues are still prominent.…
ShinyHunters-linked heist thought to have been ongoing since March Exclusive A massive online heist targeting AWS customers during which digital crooks abused misconfigurations in public websites and stole source code, thousands of credentials, and other secrets remains "ongoing to this day," according to security researchers.…
NHS supplier that leaked employee info fell victim to fiddly access controls that can leave databases dangling online Private businesses and public-sector organizations are unwittingly exposing millions of people's sensitive information to the public internet because they misconfigure Microsoft’s Power Pages website creation problem.…
Better check your widgets, people Security researchers say that thousands of companies are potentially leaking secrets from their internal knowledge base (KB) articles via ServiceNow misconfigurations.…
Outsourcers outsourced work for the BBC, Amazon, and HBO Max to the hermit kingdom A misconfigured cloud server that used a North Korean IP address has led to the discovery that film production studios including the BBC, Amazon, and HBO Max could be inadvertently hiring workers from the hermit kingdom for animation projects.…
Irony alerts: Open Web Application Security Project Foundation suffers lapse A misconfigured MediaWiki web server allowed digital snoops to access members' resumes containing their personal details at the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Foundation.…
Warning: Poorly configured Google Cloud databases spill billing info, plaintext credentials At least 900 websites built with Google's Firebase, a cloud database, have been misconfigured, leaving credentials, personal info, and other sensitive data inadvertently exposed to the public internet, according to security researchers.…
Pen-tester accessed more than 650,000 sensitive messages, and still can, at Indian outfit using Toyota SaaS Toyota Tsusho Insurance Broker India (TTIBI), an Indo-Japanese joint insurance venture, operated a misconfigured server that exposed more than 650,000 Microsoft-hosted email messages to customers, a security researcher has found.…
Calls for wider adoption of security-by-design principles continue to ring loudly from Uncle Sam The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) are blaming unchanged default credentials as the prime security misconfiguration that leads to cyberattacks.…
Also, hackers publish RaidForum user data, Google's $180k Chrome bug bounty, and this week's vulnerabilities infosec in brief Japanese automaker Toyota is again apologizing for spilling customer records online due to a misconfigured cloud environment – the same explanation it gave when the same thing happened a couple of weeks ago. It's like a pattern.…
Also: 3D printing gun mods = jail time; France fines Clearview AI for ignoring fine; this week's critical vulns, and more in brief Japanese automaker Toyota has admitted yet again to mishandling customer data – this time saying it exposed information on more than two million Japanese customers for the past decade, thanks to a misconfigured cloud environment. …
'BingBang' boo-boo affected other internal Microsoft apps, too A misconfiguration in Microsoft's Azure Active Directory (AAD) could have allowed miscreants to subvert Microsoft's Bing search engine – even changing search results. User information including Outlook emails, calendars and Teams messages was also vulnerable.…
Malicious toolkit targets misconfigured hosts in AWS and Office 365 A fast-evolving toolkit that can be used to compromise email and web hosting services represents a disturbing evolution of attacks in the cloud, which for the most part have previously been confined to mining cryptocurrencies.…
Educator gets an F for security Misconfigured Amazon Web Services S3 buckets belonging to McGraw Hill exposed more than 100,000 students' information as well as the education publishing giant's own source code and digital keys, according to security researchers.…