Researchers Discover Hundreds of Amazon RDS Instances Leaking Users' Personal Data
Nov 16, 2022
Hundreds of databases on Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) are exposing personal identifiable information (PII), new findings from Mitiga, a cloud incident response company, show. "Leaking PII in this manner provides a potential treasure trove for threat actors – either during the reconnaissance phase of the cyber kill chain or extortionware/ransomware campaigns," researchers Ariel Szarf, Doron Karmi, and Lionel Saposnik said in a report shared with The Hacker News. This includes names, email addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, marital status, car rental information, and even company logins. Amazon RDS is a web service that makes it possible to set up relational databases in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. It offers support for different database engines such as MariaDB, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server. The root cause of the leaks stems from a feature called public RDS snapshots , which allows for creating a backup of the entire da