Attunity Leaked 750 Gigabytes of Compressed Email Backups

• A data management and migration company has left three Amazon S3 buckets exposed to the public.
• The information contained was a treasure for data thieves, but the company says no one accessed it.
• The clients that have been potentially exposed by the incident include fifty Fortune 100 companies.

According to a staggering revelation by the UpGuard Data Breach Research team, the data management company “Attunity” has exposed about 750 gigabytes of compressed email backups through three unsecured Amazon S3 buckets. The data belongs to several of Attunity’s clients, including Fortune 100 companies, and constitutes of OneDrive account credentials, email correspondence, system passwords, sales and marketing contact information, project specifications, and more information relating to the roles and tasks of the employees. The servers have now been secured following UpGuard’s notification to Attunity, so the disclosure comes after the protection measures have been established.

The discovery of the unprotected buckets happened on May 13, 2019, and the notice to Attunity was sent three days later. According to the researchers, the data that was to be found in the backups dates back to September 2014, while the first date of exposure is unknown. The companies that were affected by this exposure incident are about two thousand enterprises and approximately half of the Fortune 100 entries. Attunity was providing cloud migration and data integration services to these companies, so they have failed to manage the risks that are associated with the handling of customer data responsively.

The UpGuard team found a rich set of Netflix database authentication strings, a collection of TD Bank software upgrade invoices, various project preparation slides belonging to Ford, and a lot more that won’t make a difference at this point. The exposure was gigantic and imperiled numerous large corporations and organizations, their employees, and their customers. Due to the whopping volume of the data, UpGuard couldn’t even evaluate the level of the exposure in its full entirety, which indicates the high risks of having a single company collect and manage so many sensitive datasets. Attunity suffered the worst kind of damage, as the information of their own employees was exposed with the complete payroll and personal identification details.

Attunity has only recently been acquired by Qlik, a Swedish specialist in data analytics and business intelligence, and this didn’t help in responding to the incident immediately. Moreover, the exposed backups were updated until very recently, so the latest information was added a couple of days prior to the discovery by UpGuard. Whether or not this exposure has been noticed by malicious actors remains unknown right now, and Attunity claims that UpGuard was the only foreign entity that accessed the data. However, this will be determined by the thorough investigation that will be carried out by an independent security firm, so stay tuned.

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