HACKED! View Media
By Kevin Lancaster, IDAgent
Exploit: Unsecured Database
View Media: Online Marketing Firm
Risk to Business: 2.201 = Severe
A publicly accessible Amazon Web Services (AWS) server that belongs to View Media was discovered by cybersecurity researchers, overflowing with more than 38 million US user records, including their full names, email and street addresses, phone numbers, and ZIP codes. The data included 700 statement of work documents for targeted email and direct mail advertising campaigns stored in PDF files, and 59 CSV and XLS files that contained 38,765,297 records of US citizens in total, of which 23,511,441 records were unique. The bucket also contained thousands of files for various marketing materials, such as banner advertisements, newsletters, and promotional flyers sorted by locations and ZIP codes that the marketing company’s campaigns targeted.
Individual Risk: 2.919 = Moderate
While this is a huge trove of information, no financial or protected personal information was involved, although this information will make its way into Dark Web data dumps.
Customers Impacted: 38 million +
How it Could Affect Their Business: Failing to undertake a simple bit of maintenance like this doesn’t look good in front of potential partners, who may become concerned that their business is a third party security risk and reconsider hiring them.
To learn more about how you can eliminate/mitigate these kinds of threats to your organization, call 239.790.4479 and speak to one of our security specialists today.
