Cybersecurity researcher Jeremiah Fowler found that over a dozen unprotected databases from the German firm Lost and Found Software exposed 820,750 sensitive personal records about lost airport items and their owners in the U.S., Canada, and Europe.
Misconfigured databases, now secured, previously exposed sensitive information such as images of lost items, payment confirmations, and personal documents like driver’s licenses and passports, according to cybersecurity researcher Jeremy Fowler. This leaked data poses risks for identity theft and phishing attacks. Fowler advises organizations to adopt stronger authentication methods and more complex database names to prevent future issues.
“Even if one or more of the databases is secured, it is clear to the criminals what type of data is stored there, and they can launch a wide range of potential attacks to gain unauthorized access,” Fowler added.
Lost and Found’s security team informed the researcher that the issue was caused by incorrect S3 bucket policy rules, which was overridden by ACL settings. It appears that their entire internal database was not exposed and only these individual S3 Buckets were misconfigured.
Source: websiteplanet
“Thank you for bringing your security research to our attention. We have already taken initial steps to restrict public access to the information and are working on removing access to the specific files that were available until now” Lost and Found responded.