Thousands of Subscribers Data Exposed
A Nine News Data Breath has left the personal data of nearly 16,0000 subscribers to Nine newspapers exposed. Nine Entertainment Co. owns Nine Newspapers, which also owns newspapers like The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. A spokesman for the company claims that Nine has taken the matter seriously and worked with researchers to resolve the issue.
The Backstory to the Nine News Data Breach
On March 19, a Mastadon user named Kasper, claims he found the data when he was searching the cloud for open S3 buckets. These buckets are essentially storage containers for files and metadata on Amazon Web Service (AWS). If there are open buckets, data and files are vulnerable to attack. Kasper is a security researcher who looks for exposed data on the Amazon cloud storage. The user reported that the data included details such as names, addresses and email IDs. Kasper claims that he tried to contact Nine, but received no response.
Nearly a week later, another Mastadon, Martin Seegar, began asking about contacting Nine Newspapers because of the personal nature of the data. After other researchers failed to get in touch with the company, Mr Seegar got involved. Seegar chalked up the Nine News Data breach to negligence. The data did not contain credit card or bank information. However, this kind of data breach leaves subscribers vulnerable to other attacks.
Spokesman Responds to the Nine News Data Breach
A spokesman for Nine responded, saying that a researcher informed the company that certain personal information was not protected according to strict internal protocols.
The spokesman also said that the company was contacting the 16,000 subscribers affected. He also confirmed that the data leaked was limited to names, addresses and email IDs.
Sources
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