I cannot be alone in my frustration over the constant reports of data leakage from the cloud. It seems a day cannot go by without another incident being reported; yet none of them seems enough to serve as a rallying cry for change.
The number and scale of leaks are both increasing, as is the potential impact on those affected (both the organizations leaking the data and those about whom the data pertains). The number and scale of leaks are both increasing, as is the potential impact on those affected (both the organizations leaking the data and those about whom the data pertains). Rather than determining whether a leak is worth media attention by the fame of the brand name concerned, the headlines should be paying more attention to the numbers and type of data involved.
Novaestrat, an Ecuadorian data analytics and marketing company, recently left an unsecured Elasticsearch server exposed, potentially compromising data on nearly 21 million individuals. This number includes duplicate records and obsolete entries but considering that the population of Ecuador is 16.6 million, that is a huge number!
Leaky AWS S3 buckets are probably the most common crime scene for unsecured data in the cloud and LionAir is the latest S3 exposure example. The company left an exposed AWS buckets containing personally identifiable information – including passport numbers – belonging to millions of passengers. Big names often lurk behind lesser known organizations within the supply chain for these incidents. In another recent example, data company Attunity left a trove of data belonging to Ford, Netflix and TD Bank in publicly accessible S3 buckets.
I could go on and mention many more examples, but this exercise won’t answer the fundamental question: why do these incidents continue to happen?
The fourth Cloud Security Alliance Top Threats report (2019) shows that many of us are not blind to the risks. 241 industry experts place data breaches, misconfiguration of cloud infrastructure and a lack of cloud security architecture and strategy as the top three risks in cloud usage. Of course, not all enterprise cloud consumers are experts, but the majority of those responsible for cloud infrastructure are, at least, specialists. So, assuming that the risks of cloud threats are understood, I believe that too many organizations still do not completely understand t