The Express Tribune reports:
A serious data breach has exposed the personal information of millions of French citizens. Cybersecurity researchers at Cybernews discovered an open Elasticsearch server containing a trove of data from at least 17 separate data breaches. This database, nicknamed “vip-v3,” held information on an estimated 95 million French individuals, representing a significant portion of the country’s population.
The exposed data included phone numbers, email addresses, partial payment information, and potentially full names, addresses, and IP addresses. This information could be used by cybercriminals to launch targeted attacks, such as phishing scams or identity theft.
Read more at The Express Tribune
From reading the original report by Cybernews and a thread on X (Twitter), it appears that Cybernews reported a leak that was still exposed. Their report made no mention of any attempt to contact the French hosting company at all when they couldn’t figure out who owned the data cluster. Disturbingly, they even named the database in their reporting, which enabled others to quickly find the leaking data on their own.
Thankfully, a young researcher called “JayeLTee” read their report and contacted the hosting company, who responded within 45 minutes to his notification.
Comment
What is the point of publishing that you found a leak that could be dangerous to people when it is still exposed? What did Cybernews do — if anything — to get the hosting company to lock down the data when they couldn’t figure out who to contact as the owner? If they did make efforts to get the data locked down, their reporting should include that.
This is not the first time that Cybernews has published finding leaking data that they didn’t get locked down.
DataBreaches has submitted questions to Cybernews on their reporting on a few occasions. Those questions, often related to whether the data were still exposed and what Cybernews had done to get it locked down, never show up under their posts, although they recently had their public relations director email me with answers to my questions in one case.
DataBreaches would encourage Cybernews to just STOP reporting on leaks until they have gotten the entity to secure the data or have made multiple good-faith notification errors over weeks or a month or more to get it locked down. Simply reporting the way they did in this French data incident only increases the risk to people whose data has been exposed. Thankfully, JayeLTee jumped in to help protect 95 million French people.
Wording has to be carefully reviewed: the French population is about 65 millions, not 95 or more. Hence let’s not mix individuals and records.
Our headline reported the 95 million as the number of records. Some sites get it wrong, some sites get it right. We see this all the time when also reporting on medical sector where sites incorrectly equate number of patient records breached with number of unique patients. We agree with you that wording needs to be reviewed. In this case, an even bigger problem was that Cybernews failed to get the data locked down before they reported on it and they actually helped others find the exposed data by naming the database in their reporting. They have subsequently apologized for that.