AI development company’s massive data breach exposes nearly 14 million records: Vibetech collected data from different breaches and accidentally made it accessible online.
- Researchers found an exposed database containing 13.7 million records of past breaches and data breaches.
- The file included passwords, banking details, and data linked to major companies such as AT&T and Amazon.
- The database was secured after the disclosure, highlighting the current risks of repositories exposed to breaches.
Indian software development platform Vibetech appears to have been collecting data exposed in various breaches and cyber attacks and creating a large repository.
In addition to the questionable legality of this entire ordeal, an equally important issue is that the file was on the Internet, available to anyone who knew where to look.
AT&T, PayPal and more
The news comes from Jeremiah Fowler, a security researcher known for searching for unencrypted and password-protected databases on the web.
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Fowler’s investigation found a database containing 13.7 million records, including a “collection of highly sensitive data from previous breaches,” including names, people’s phone numbers, email addresses, passwords, bank account details and more.
“In a limited sample, I saw accounts and credentials belonging to people from multiple countries,” Fowler said.
The file was divided by company names: the majority of the records (nearly eight million) came from an AT&T data breach, but other notable mentions include Amazon (1.2 million), Walmart (420,000 records), BluBank Digital Bank (24,000 records), and PayPal (18,000 records). There were even (relatively small) leaks from the FBI Employee Directory (4,084 records) as well as Interpol (929 records).
This is by no means your average data breach file, as it contained passwords and banking details, making it infinitely more powerful as threat actors can directly access people’s online accounts, escalate privileges to deploy ransomware, and possibly transfer funds directly from people’s bank accounts.
Fowler later discovered that the database’s IP address was connected to a data intelligence platform operated or developed by Vibetech, which, Fowler speculates, was collecting data sets from previous breaches or leaks and inadvertently making them accessible to the public without authentication.
The researcher notified both the company and the hosting provider, and soon after the database was restricted and no longer accessible to the public. Additionally, a day later, the IP address no longer hosted the credentials in plain text and instead displayed an Information Security Management System (ISMS) compliance platform dashboard.
Unprotected databases: the nightmare of Internet privacy
According to Fowler’s report, there are a “growing number” of organizations intentionally collecting and selling breached credential data sets, ostensibly for research, monitoring or threat intelligence purposes, but the question is how legal the activity really is.
“While these data sets can provide valuable insights into attack trends, credential reuse, and emerging threats, organizations that collect compromised personal information operate in a legally and ethically complex environment,” Fowler argues.
Unprotected databases are one of the leading causes of data leaks. In many cases, this is unintentional: companies that generate or collect data often misconfigure their repositories or are under the impression that protecting data is the cloud provider’s responsibility.
For example, in early 2024, cyber news He discovered a file with personal information of approximately 223 million Brazilians. Brazil is a country of 214 million people, leading some researchers to speculate whether the country’s entire population was exposed. The researchers said they discovered the database after running a query in Elasticsearch but were unable to determine who the owners were.
Even earlier, in 2021, a B2B sales and marketing company leaked personally identifiable information (PII) of up to 126 million US citizens, when researchers discovered an unsecured database on Amazon’s cloud computing platform, AWS. The file, owned by US-based marketing company OneMoreLead, included email addresses, home addresses and phone numbers, and could more easily have been used to perpetrate identity theft, financial fraud or to design effective phishing campaigns.
People who believe their information may have been exposed in any of these breaches should change their passwords immediately and be wary of incoming email messages.
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