Over 80 US Municipalities’ Sensitive Information Left Vulnerable in Massive Data Breach

guest · Jul 22, 2021

1,000 GB of local government data exposed by Massachusetts software company
A group of ethical researchers found over 80 misconfigured Amazon S3 buckets
July 22, 2021
https://www.zdnet.com/article/1000-...ta-exposed-by-massachusetts-software-company/

More than 1,000 GB of data and over 1.6 million files from dozens of municipalities in the US were left exposed, according to a new report from a team of cybersecurity researchers with security company WizCase.

All of the towns and cities appeared to be connected through one product: mapsonline.net, which is owned by a Massachusetts company called PeopleGIS. The company provides information management software to local governments across Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Connecticut.
Click to expand...

The data ranged from residential records like deeds and tax information to business licenses and job applications for government positions.

Due to the sensitive nature of the documents, many of the forms included people's email address, physical address, phone number, driver's license number, real estate tax information, license photographs and photos of property.

"The data of these municipalities was stored in several misconfigured Amazon S3 buckets that were sharing similar naming conventions to MapsOnline. Due to this, we believe these cities are using the same software solution," the report said.
Click to expand...

"The breach could lead to massive fraud and theft from citizens of those municipalities. The highly-sensitive nature of the data contained within a local government's database, from phone numbers to business licenses to tax records, are highly susceptible to exploitation by bad actors," the report said.

"Much of this information is supposed to be only accessible by the government and the citizens, meaning someone could potentially defraud an individual by posing as a government official."
Click to expand...

WizCase: Over 80 US Municipalities’ Sensitive Information, Including Resident’s Personal Data, Left Vulnerable in Massive Data Breach

WizCase’s team of ethical hackers, led by Ata Hakçıl, has found a major breach exposing a number of US cities, all of them using the same web service provider aimed at municipalities. This breach compromised citizens’ physical addresses, phone numbers, IDs, tax documents, and more. Due to the large number and various types of unique documents, it is difficult to estimate the number of people exposed in this breach. There was no need for a password or login credentials to access this information, and the data was not encrypted.
Click to expand...

Log in or Sign up

Over 80 US Municipalities’ Sensitive Information Left Vulnerable in Massive Data Breach

guest Guest

Log in or Sign up

Over 80 US Municipalities’ Sensitive Information Left Vulnerable in Massive Data Breach

guest Guest

Useful Searches