Avon and Family Tree aren’t companies you would normally associate with cybersecurity, but this year, all three were on the wrong side of it when they suffered massive data breaches. At Avon 19 million records were leaked, and Family Tree had 25GB of data compromised. What do they have in common? All of them were using Elasticsearch databases. These are just the latest in a string of high profile breaches that have made Elasticsearch notorious in cybersecurity.

The most dependable cybersecurity strategies involve assiduously monitoring for external attack vectors. But if this is the only dimension you are monitoring, your internal networks could be compromised while your back is turned. The threat of a cyberattack is not only on the external front, many data breaches occur through compromised vendors, even highly reputable ones. To prevent cyber criminals from accessing your sensitive data through breached vendors, read on.

We at Netskope Threat Labs have published a series of blogs detailing the misconfigurations in cloud apps causing data exposure. Misconfiguration and sensitive data exposure have been listed as predominant top 10 OWASP security risks for years, and are now also the predominant cause of cloud data breaches.

Hello Security Ninjas, Today's IT world is complex and can be challenging for security operations teams. Nowadays, more apps are being integrated and interconnected than ever before. Cloud services and SaaS solutions purchased all throughout the organization outside of the IT department add even more complexity. Communicating to application and service owners the kind of activities that need to be logged and sent to the SOC can be a daunting task.

Just this week, the news broke that a poorly-secured AWS server exposed over 10 million hotel reservation logs from Cloud Hospitality websites, putting the information of millions of guests at risk. As of June 2020, more than 3.2 million consumer records have been exposed in the ten biggest data breaches this year. Organizations in virtually every industry struggle to get data loss prevention (DLP) right due to one big misconception about this important cybersecurity practice.

An undisclosed number of customers of outdoor clothing retailer The North Face have had their passwords reset by the company, following a credential-stuffing attack. The company has revealed that on October 9, 2020, it became aware that hackers had used usernames and passwords stolen from a third-party website to gain unauthorised access to customer accounts.

According to the 2019 Cost of Data Breach Report from Ponemon Institute and IBM Security, the global average cost of a data breach has grown by 12 percent in the last five years to $3.92 million. This was driven by the multi-year financial impact of breaches, increased regulation and the difficult process of resolving cyber attacks.

American bookselling giant Barnes & Noble is contacting customers via email, warning them that its network was breached by hackers, and that sensitive information about shoppers may have been accessed. In the email to customers, Barnes & Noble says that it became aware that it had fallen victim to a cybersecurity attack on Saturday October 10th.