When Security Researchers Pose as Cybercrooks, Who Can Tell the Difference?
Summary: Security researcher Vinny Troia, who runs NightLion Security, discovered that speaker bureau All American Entertainment had exposed thousands of speaking contracts, including rates and travel details, in an unsecured Amazon cloud instance requiring no password. Troia was also the finder of a nearly 10-terabyte open cloud database that LinkedIn's security team said was an amalgamation of scraped data from LinkedIn and dozens of public sources, and a Kickass forum user named Soundcard later offered what he claimed was all of LinkedIn's user data for 2 BTC.
Why it matters: The same researcher who reported the All American leak was offering LinkedIn user data for sale on a crime forum under the nickname Soundcard, which is the problem in one line: when the person reporting your exposed cloud bucket is also a seller on Kickass, telling researcher from crook is not a judgment your incident response team can make from the outside.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- Data Breaches
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