Anurag Sen, a famous cybersecurity expert said that ACY Securities, an Australia-based trading company accidentally posted huge amounts of personal and financial data of unsuspected users and businesses on the web for public access. The incident happened because of misconfigured database that ACY Securities owns. Sadly, the data leak had over 60GB worth of data that was left in the open without any protection.
It means that anyone with basic knowledge about obtaining unsafe databases from platforms like Shodan can gain full access to ACY's data. The data had logs from February 2020 to this date, getting updated regularly. The exposed data includes- full name, postal code, address, date of birth, email address, gender details, contact number, password, and banking, and financial information. The attack hit businesses in various countries including China, India, Spain, Russia, Brazil, Australia, Romania, Malaysia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Indonesia, and United Arab Emirates.
The expose is very severe because, at the beginning of this year, Anonymous and affiliated hacker groups totaled 90% (estimated) of Russian cloud databases, leaked to the public. The exposed data in these leaks was without a password or authentication.
In the ACY Securities incident, if we consider the extent and nature of leaked data, the case could've turned out to have the worst implication. For instance, threat actors could have downloaded tha data and performed phishing scams, identity thefts, marketing campaign scams, and microloans identity scams.
"misconfigured or unsecured databases, as we know it, have become a major privacy threat to companies and unsuspected users. In 2020, researchers identified over 10,000 unsecured databases that exposed more than ten billion (10,463,315,645) records to public access without any security authentication. In 2021, the number increased to 399,200 exposed databases," read a post on HackRead.
