Pierluigi Paganini June 29, 2019

Attunity data integration and big data management firm exposed a significant amount of sensitive data through unprotected Amazon S3 buckets.

Data integration and big data management firm Attunity exposed a significant amount of sensitive data through unprotected Amazon S3 buckets.

The company, owned by Qlik, provides solutions to over 2,000 enterprises and half of the Fortune 100 firms.

The data leak was discovered on May 13 by a researcher at cyber resilience company UpGuard that found three unprotected AWS cloud storage buckets belonging to Attunity.

“An UpGuard researcher discovered three publicly accessible Amazon S3 buckets related to Attunity. Of those, one contained a large collection of internal business documents. The total size is uncertain, but the researcher downloaded a sample of about a terabyte in size, including 750 gigabytes of compressed email backups.” reads the post published by Upguard. “Backups of employees’ OneDrive accounts were also present and spanned the wide range of information that employees need to perform their jobs: email correspondence, system passwords, sales and marketing contact information, project specifications, and more.”

The buckets contained a vast amount of data, the expert downloaded a terabyte for analysis. The huge trove of data contained email backups, business documents, and employee OneDrive account backups (containing emails, passwords, project specifications, and marketing and sales contact information), and customer-related information.

UpGuard shared as proof of the leak a Netflix database authentication strings, an invoice for a TD Bank software update, and slides describing a project for Ford.

Researchers also found credentials for Attunity systems and its official Twitter account, and an employee personal information (names, salary, date of birth, and employee ID numbers).

Some of the files are dated back September 2014, while other documents were uploaded a few days prior to the expert at UpGuard’s discovery the AWS buckers. at the time of writing its unclear how long data remained exposed online. UpGuard reported its discovery to Attunity on May 16, and the company quickly secured the buckets.

“The chain of events leading to the exposure of that data provides a useful lesson in the ecology of a data leak scenario. Users’ workstations may be secured against attackers breaking in, but other IT processes can copy and expose the same data valued by attackers.” concludes the company. “When such backups are exposed, they can contain a variety of data from system credentials to personally identifiable information. Data is not safe if misconfigurations and process errors expose that data to the public internet.”

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – Attunity, AWS buckets)

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