MacKeeper Security Research Center reports that PIP Printing and Marketing Services, a franchise of Franchise Services in California, was leaking data:
The majority of 400+ GB server is dedicated to design files and images relating to the printing business. The most sensitive information is contained within the “Outlook archives” and “Scans” folders. These contain around 50+GB of scanned documents relating to court cases, medical records, well known companies, and celebrities. There is an archive of correspondence where company’s clients ask managers to make copies of the attached documents. This archive contains more than 2,200 messages and some of them have credit card numbers and billing details in plain text.
[…]
Among sensitive data: documents of former American professional football players, with data included NFL retirement info, Social Security Numbers, and some medical information; thousands of confidential files of Larry Flynt’s Hustler Hollywood retail stores. The files date back as far as 2010 and include HR documentation, internal investigations, sales numbers, goals, and profit and loss statements for each store.
That so much data was exposed due to a misconfigured Rsync service should come as no surprise to regular readers of this site. Nor should it be a surprise that despite repeated efforts on MacKeeper’s part to notify them and get them to address the security issue, it took from October 2016 until now for the situation to be resolved.
It is not clear at this time whether anyone accessed and downloaded the data other than MacKeeper’s researchers.
Tom Spring of Threatpost also reported on this leak, noting:
MacKeeper Security Research Center said it discovered the data in October stored insecurely on the internet belonging to PIP Printing and Marketing Services, one of Franchise Services brands. More than three months later, Franchise Services is just now acknowledging being told of the vulnerable server by MacKeeper, despite repeated notification attempts.
“This appears to be an isolated incident involving one of our many franchise owners,” said Christian Lau, vice president, information technology for Franchise Services. “We are looking into what may have gone wrong.”
Well, I can tell them one thing that went wrong: they didn’t respond to notification promptly. What if MacKeeper hadn’t been so persistent? How much worse would this have become?