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What NOT to do when researchers notify you of a breach

Posted on October 8, 2018 by Lee J

This story is going to be straight up, forward and simple. What not to do when a researcher like myself contacts you about a security incident. Every day all around the world researchers are being ignored by those who they attempt to help out.

Recently another researcher discovered a open s3 bucket that belong to a company based in australia called sustainablecertification.com.au who gives out certifications for various fields including IT and operates in various different countrys across asia.

The open data was discovered first by @random_robbie and then again by @s7nsins who alerted me to it. After checking the data it was discovered that thousands of certification details and payment details had been left in this unsecured s3 bucket and that anyone with the url could go and download any of the 34,000 or so files that are located on their bucket.

Data includeds but is not limited to full certifcations, invoices, management & internal files, emails, email attachments, HCCAP reports/audits, audi service agreements.

After digging around and finding contact for the CEO i attempted to contact them via email which after getting a reply left me without words on how stubborn some people truely are. The contact i put forward always has "who" i am, "what" i do, and "what" i am contacting them about, however it appears that the CEO of Sustainable Certification, Swami Nathan can not process this basic information and the only reply i ever got back from him was "who are you"

who-are-you-1

In reply to this i re-sent most of my orginal email back to him stating who i was, to this day the s3 bucket is still open and swami has never contacted back.

So to this day and at least for the passed couple of months all clients and persons who have taken any certifications or used other services that Sustainable Certification offers then you may of had some of your personal information left unsecured online by the company it self.

some basic statistics from this
Countrys: AU,IN,IR,KR,MY,SG,TR
Total Files: 34,468
Total Folders: 139
Total Size: 13.3GB

So in simple if a researcher contacts you, make a effort to speak to them properly, it could save your business image and even more by doing so.

Category: Breach Incidents

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