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US Defense Contractor left Sensitive Files on Amazon Server Without Password

US Defense Contractor left Sensitive Files on Amazon Server Without Password

May 31, 2017
Sensitive files linked to the United States intelligence agency were reportedly left on a public Amazon server by one of the nation's top intelligence contractor without a password, according to a new report. UpGuard cyber risk analyst Chris Vickery discovered  a cache of 60,000 documents from a US military project for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) left unsecured on Amazon cloud storage server for anyone to access. The documents included passwords to a US government system containing sensitive information, and the security credentials of a senior employee of Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the country's top defense contractors. Although there wasn't any top secret file in the cache Vickery discovered, the documents included credentials to log into code repositories that could contain classified files and other credentials. Master Credentials to a Highly-Protected Pentagon System were Exposed Roughly 28GB of exposed documents included the privat...
How A Simple Command Typo Took Down Amazon S3 and Big Chunk of the Internet

How A Simple Command Typo Took Down Amazon S3 and Big Chunk of the Internet

Mar 03, 2017
The major internet outage across the United States earlier this week was not due to any virus or malware or state-sponsored cyber attack, rather it was the result of a simple TYPO. Amazon on Thursday admitted that an incorrectly typed command during a routine debugging of the company's billing system caused the 5-hour-long outage of some Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers on Tuesday. The issue caused tens of thousands of websites and services to become completely unavailable, while others show broken images and links, which left online users around the world confused. The sites and services affected by the disruption include Quora, Slack, Medium, Giphy, Trello, Splitwise, Soundcloud, and IFTTT, among a ton of others. Here's What Happened: On Tuesday morning, members of Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) team were debugging the S3 cloud-storage billing system. As part of the process, the team needed to take a few billing servers offline, but unfortunately, it end...
Police Ask for Amazon Echo Data to Help Solve a Murder Case

Police Ask for Amazon Echo Data to Help Solve a Murder Case

Dec 28, 2016
Hey, Alexa! Who did this murder? Arkansas police are seeking help from e-commerce giant Amazon for data that may have been recorded on its Echo device belonging to a suspect in a murder case, bringing the conflict into the realm of the Internet of Things. Amazon Echo is a voice-activated smart home speaker capable of controlling several smart devices by integrating it with a variety of home automation hubs. It can do tasks like play music, make to-do lists, set alarms, and also provide real-time information such as weather and traffic. As first reported by The Information, authorities in Bentonville have issued a warrant for Amazon to hand over audio or records from an Echo device belonging to James Andrew Bates in the hope that they'll aid in uncovering additional details about the murder of Victor Collins. Just like Apple refused the FBI to help them unlock iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino terrorists, Amazon also declined to give police any of the info...
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websitePush SecurityThreat Detection / Identity Security
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Securing Agentic AI: How to Protect the Invisible Identity Access

Securing Agentic AI: How to Protect the Invisible Identity Access

Jul 15, 2025Automation / Risk Management
AI agents promise to automate everything from financial reconciliations to incident response. Yet every time an AI agent spins up a workflow, it has to authenticate somewhere; often with a high-privilege API key, OAuth token, or service account that defenders can't easily see. These "invisible" non-human identities (NHIs) now outnumber human accounts in most cloud environments, and they have become one of the ripest targets for attackers. Astrix's Field CTO Jonathan Sander put it bluntly in a recent Hacker News webinar : "One dangerous habit we've had for a long time is trusting application logic to act as the guardrails. That doesn't work when your AI agent is powered by LLMs that don't stop and think when they're about to do something wrong. They just do it." Why AI Agents Redefine Identity Risk Autonomy changes everything: An AI agent can chain multiple API calls and modify data without a human in the loop. If the underlying credential is exposed or overprivileged, each addit...
Hackers leak 13,000 Passwords Of Amazon, Walmart and Brazzers Users

Hackers leak 13,000 Passwords Of Amazon, Walmart and Brazzers Users

Dec 27, 2014
Hackers claiming affiliation with the hacktivist group "Anonymous" have allegedly leaked more than 13,000 username and password combinations for some of the worlds most popular websites, including Amazon, Xbox Live and Playstation Network . The stolen personal information was released in a massive text document posted to the Internet file-sharing website Ghostbin  (now deleted) , on Friday. The document contains a huge number of usernames and passwords, along with credit card numbers and expiration dates. The news came just a day after the hacker group Lizard Squad compromised Sony's Playstation and Microsoft's Xbox Live gaming networks on Christmas day, which is estimated to have affected Xbox's 48 million subscribers and PlayStation's 110 million users, making it a total of more than 150 million users worldwide. However, data breach of 13,000 users is not the biggest data breach we've ever seen. When millions of passwords are used for sites ar...
U.S. based Cloud Hosting providers contribute 44% of Malware distribution

U.S. based Cloud Hosting providers contribute 44% of Malware distribution

Jan 20, 2014
U.S. has the top Security Agencies like NSA, FBI to tackle cyber crime and terrorism with their high profile surveillance technologies, but even after that U.S is proudly hosting 44% of the entire cloud based malware distribution. With the enhancement in Internet technology, Cloud computing has shown the possibility of existence and now has become an essential gradient for any Internet Identity. Cloud services are designed in such a way that it is easy to maintain, use, configure and can be scaled depending upon the requirement of the service being provided using the CLOUD technology with cost effective manner. Due to the Easy and Cost effective alternative of traditional computing, Malware writers are using the big cloud hosting platforms to quickly and effectively serve malware to Internet users, allowing them to bypass detection and geographic blacklisting by serving from a trusted provider. Hiding behind trusted domains and names is not something new. According to recently ...
Dutch Police Arrest 16-Year-Old for Pro-WikiLeaks Cyber Attacks

Dutch Police Arrest 16-Year-Old for Pro-WikiLeaks Cyber Attacks

Dec 10, 2010
Dutch authorities announced the arrest of a 16-year-old hacker involved in the pro-WikiLeaks attacks on the websites of MasterCard and PayPal. The Dutch National Prosecutors Office reported that the teen, whose name was not disclosed, was arrested by a high-tech crime team last night. The arrest follows a series of attacks organized by the group known as Anonymous. This group has previously targeted entities such as the Church of Scientology and the Australian government. Recently, they launched distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on companies distancing themselves from WikiLeaks. These attacks use thousands of computers to overwhelm a target by making simultaneous connections. Yesterday, Visa.com was briefly taken offline, though the company assured CNET that no payments or transactions were affected. MasterCard.com was also unreachable in the morning. Additionally, the website for the Swedish prosecution agency, which is seeking the extradition of WikiLeaks editor Julian A...
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