On January 3, the U.S. announced the successful assassination of Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s top general. Dire warnings about retaliation immediately appeared in the news, and it wasn’t long before we began to see headlines claiming that Iran had launched cyberattacks on the U.S. But were these really state actors or sophisticated actors, or or were…
Author: Lee J
Smart cities with not-so-smart security — again!
Smart cities are a very hot topic these days as we have seen reports of facial detection and state surveillance in China as well as other Asian countries and Ecuador. Recently we have also seen news about an Alibaba-owned project called City Brain that has advanced video and processing ability for facial detection, real-time information…
Vistaprint Logomaker files viewable due to insecure Amazon s3 bucket
Vistaprint. Everyone knows it and probably almost everyone knows somebody who has used the firm to design or print business cards, brochures, or other business-related stationery or marketing-related materials. Recently I was on Vistaprint’s site to create a new logo for ctrlbox.com. To my unpleasant surprise, I discovered that the preview of my logo displayed…
SonyLIV Fixes leaky Elasticsearch in record time
Once again, a service owned and control by a division of official Sony Entertainment has slipped up. This time, their error exposed a elasticsearch server leaking log entries that feed into a third-party tool. Sony is no stranger when it comes to reports of poor infosecurity and hacking incidents, but it is not often we…
China Citizen Watch (Finally) Secures 150TB of Leaking Data
China Citizen Watch, the official Chinese division of the Japanese watch giant Citizen, and Bulova Watch Company (a Citizen brand in the U.S.) have both been affected because China Citizen Watch or its hosting company left an unsecured RSYNC server online with more than 150TB of files. Cursory skimming of the files, necessitated by Citizen…
Unsecured backup devices continue to be a hot mess
After a few years of headlines blaring mega-numbers of records exposed by misconfigured RSYNC backups, we might hope that we would be seeing fewer errors by now. But it seems that RSYNC errors continue at a high rate, exposing massive amounts of data. This month, part of what I did was look at RSYNC errors…