Reindeer Leak Personal Data of 3,00,000 Users In A Breach

WizCase’s cybersecurity group discovered a prominent breach impacting Reindeer, an American marketing company that previously worked with Tiffany & Co., Patròn Tequila, and other companies. Led by Ata Hakçil, the group revealed that the breach leaked customer names, DOB, email ids, phone numbers, address, etc. The cybersecurity experts found a misconfigured Amazing S3 bucket that belonged to Reindeer.

It contained around 50,000 files and a total of 32 GB of data. Reindeer is currently a defunct American advertising company. Being a defunct company, it owns the bucket, so researchers had to contact Amazon for information about the breach as it is the only source that could provide details about the attack. The team also informed US-Cert, in hopes that it would contact the previous company owner. The misconfigured S3 bucket contained data of around 3,00,000 customers of Reindeer clients. Patròn was the top client with the highest number of customer PII (Personal Identifiable Information) leaked, however, other Reindeer clients were also affected, such as Jack Wills, a UK clothing brand. It seems that it has become an easy task to misconfigure permission/access errors in cloud-based deployments. 

The companies that are set to work on cloud-based platforms should have a robust cybersecurity system that keeps an eye on such breaches and informs about any potential error in the cloud infrastructure. The leaked information contains details of around 3,60,009 customers and profit photos of 1400 users. PPI include customer names, address, DOB, e-mail ids, Facebook Ids, and hashed passwords. As per the experts, 35 countries’ users were included in the breach, the top three being Canada, the US, and Britain, having around 2,80,000 affected users. 

“The leaked data dates from May 2007-February 2012. The public cloud brings a whole host of new issues to which organizations are still adapting. The case of the Reindeer breach raises serious questions about the shared responsibility model and certainly highlights the need for a layered defense. When it comes to PaaS services, like S3, organizations must implement network-based access controls and apply security policies to protect against sensitive data exfiltration,” said Valtix CEO Douglas Murray.