In any given week, security researchers discover caches of data on cloud servers that are completely open to the public, usually containing the most sensitive information about a company’s customers. Leaks were found earlier this summer that revealed data coming from Avon as well as from Ancestry.com. This latter leak wasn’t the first breach for Ancestry — it had an earlier 2017 leak here. The problem is simple to describe and appears — at least at first glance — simple to fix. When you initially set up your online storage, you are asked who has access and what rights are accorded to each user. However, developers have hundreds if not thousands of containers to keep track of, and sometimes they forget to lock all of them down.

In my blog for Network Solutions, I discuss how to find these unsecured containers and how to prevent these leaks from happening.