Industry News: ESG5

The Target: Thomson Reuters, a multi-national media conglomerate.

The Take: Exposure of sensitive company login credentials, including plain-text passwords to some third-party vendors, corporate and legal information, and logs which contain the email addresses of account holders who recently reset their passwords.

The Vector: A misconfigured Elasticsearch server was accessible over the internet to anyone with a connection.

This breach is critical reminder that authentication controls are an important piece in an overall robust cybersecurity posture, especially maintaining correct access configurations. The data exposed here can also lead to pivot attacks and targeted phishing. Multi-factor authentication, reasonably regular forced password resets, and password length and complexity rules are all effective strategies to mitigate these kinds of breaches to protect a firm’s data.

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