The most well-known type of system credential is the administrative, or root password. These types of accounts are “administrators,” meaning they usually have total access to whatever system they are for. Administrator accounts are used by your IT staff or contractors to manage the basic operations of a system. These operational tasks could include maintenance, data migrations, and other common IT work that requires elevated access beyond normal business use.

Even as public awareness of data breaches grows, the popular conception of what information is sensitive, and how sensitive it is, lags behind the threats that individuals, businesses, and governments face today. The classic model for a data breach is individuals’ login credentials for banking or private identity information like their social security numbers, but there is equal– and in many cases far greater– value in information with less obvious potential for abuse.

The insurance industry has been consistently targeted for cyber attacks as of late, for good reason: sensitive data is at the heart of every process—from handling health insurance claims to archiving medical histories. And because medical records are worth ten times more than credit card information on the black market, firms handling said data are required to take extra precautions in bolstering information security.

There are many different kinds of sensitive data that can be exposed, each with its own particular exploits and consequences. This article will focus on what we have categorized as “systems information,” data that describes digital operations, such as systems inventory, configuration details, data center and cloud design, performance metrics and analyses, application code, and IT business data, such as equipment spend, vendor discount, and budgeting.

During the course of UpGuard’s cyber risk research, we uncover many assets that are publicly readable: cloud storage, file synchronization services, code repositories, and more. Most data exposures occur because of publicly readable assets, where sensitive and confidential data is leaked to the internet at large by way of a permissions misconfiguration.

Previously we introduced the concept of cloud leaks, and then examined how they happen. Now we’ll take a look at why they matter. To understand the consequences of cloud leaks for the organizations involved, we should first take a close look at exactly what it is that’s being leaked. Then we can examine some of the traditional ways information has been exploited, as well as some new and future threats such data exposures pose.

No, we aren't talking about your burger-inhaling operator passing out on the job, leaving your precious IT assets unattended. You've probably guessed that we're referring to the latest Wendy's data breach announcement: on June 9th, the international fast food chain disclosed that its January 2016 security compromise was, in fact, a lot worse than originally stated—potentially eclipsing the Home Depot and Target data breaches.