Pwned Passwords – Have Your Credentials Been Stolen?

By Paul Sullivan, Software Engineer, Bitglass

Data breaches now seem to be a daily occurrence. In recent months, Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) introduced Pwned Passwords, which allows you to securely check your password against a database of breach data. There are over 280 breaches in the database, and that's only the tip of the iceberg. Breaches aren't just a problem for the users who lose their data, but for the companies responsible for it.

So how does all this data get breached?

Surely, it was some sinister character in a hoodie with extensive knowledge of computers, right? As it turns out, many of the data breaches came from misconfigured databases and Amazon S3 buckets that were left wide open for anyone who knows where to look. S3 is easy to use, which is great for security-conscious developers. However, it also makes it easy for someone who doesn't understand security to toss some data into the cloud (so that it's publicly viewable) and forget about it. As noted by Troy Hunt, the security researcher who runs HIBP, one company was breached because it stored personal data from IoT devices in MongoDB and Amazon S3 buckets with no credentials. It's not just small, unorganized companies that make these mistakes either. Big corporations are losing track of their configurations, too.

Proper training is a good way to help with these problems, but it's not always enough. Fortunately, a cloud access security broker (CASB) can help keep S3 and other cloud data secure by encrypting the data at rest. That way, even if data can be accessed by unauthorized parties, it is still unreadable and protected. A CASB can also provide auditing and analytics tools to help detect suspicious activity so that data breaches can be detected early as well as prevented from happening in the first place.