1.500 million files with sensitive information exposed on the Internet

Security researchers from threat intel firm Digital Shadows detected, during the first three months of 2018, more than 1.500 million public available files from open Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets, rsync, Server Message Block (SMB), File Transfer Protocol (FTP) servers, misconfigured websites, and Network Attached Storage (NAS) drives.

This documents, which amount to a total of more than 12PB, included payroll data, tax returns, medical records, credit cards and intellectual property from private individual and companies, principally from United Kingdom. In addition to that, researchers found a large volume of point-of-sale terminal data, such as transactions, times, places, and even some credit card details and also sensitive company information such as patents and the source code from a copyright application.