Data Leak Scams
In cybersecurity, data leak scams are a type of fraud where a scammer uses sensitive information that has been unintentionally exposed or "leaked" to manipulate victims. While a data breach is a malicious act where a hacker intentionally steals data, a data leak is often an accidental exposure, for example, due to human error, misconfigured cloud storage, or an unsecured database. Scammers then exploit these leaks.
How Data Leak Scams Work
A data leak scam typically begins with a data leak or breach that exposes sensitive information, such as email addresses, phone numbers, or even usernames and passwords. Scammers use this leaked information to create believable and highly targeted phishing campaigns.
For example, a scammer might:
Obtain Leaked Data: A company experiences a data leak, and the scammer gains access to a list of customer email addresses.
Craft a Phishing Message: The scammer sends a phishing email to the customers, claiming to be the company that leaked. The message might say, "We noticed some suspicious activity on your account," or "Your password has been reset due to a data breach".
Create a Sense of Urgency: The scammer pressures the victim to act quickly to "verify" their account or "secure" their information.
Harvest Credentials: The email contains a link to a fake login page that looks identical to the real company's website. When the victim enters their username and password, the scammer harvests the credentials, which they can then use to access the victim's real account, sell on the dark web, or commit identity theft.
Key Differentiators and Prevention
The key difference between a data leak and a data breach is the intent: a data leak is often unintentional, while a data breach is malicious. However, the outcome is the same: sensitive data is compromised and can be used for scams and fraud.
Prevention involves a multi-layered approach:
For Organizations: Preventing data leaks requires strong security policies, regular security audits, and automated tools to ensure systems are correctly configured.
For Individuals: If you receive a notification about a data leak, do not click on any links in the message. Instead, go directly to the company's official website or contact them through a verified phone number you know is genuine. It is also essential to use strong, unique passwords for all accounts and enable multi-factor authentication whenever possible.
ThreatNG helps organizations prevent and address data leak scams by proactively identifying and assessing external-facing vulnerabilities and exposures that could lead to unintentional data leaks. It provides a continuous, outside-in view to help an organization understand where its data might be at risk.
External Discovery and Assessment
ThreatNG’s External Discovery is the initial step in helping with data leak scams. It acts as a security researcher, scanning a wide range of external sources to identify all of an organization's public-facing assets, including subdomains, cloud services, and APIs, without any connectors. This helps an organization see all potential entry points and exposed assets where a data leak could originate.
ThreatNG's assessments then provide valuable information about potential vulnerabilities that could be exploited in a data leak:
Data Leak Susceptibility: This assessment directly identifies the potential for data leaks from external-facing systems. It is derived from external attack surface intelligence, including Cloud and SaaS Exposure, Dark Web Presence (for compromised credentials), and Domain Intelligence.
Sensitive Code Exposure: ThreatNG's Code Secret Exposure assessment discovers exposed code repositories and sensitive data within them. For instance, ThreatNG can find credentials or API keys that were accidentally left in a public code repository, which could be used to access an organization’s systems and cause a data leak.
Cloud and SaaS Exposure: This assessment evaluates an organization's cloud services and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions, including both sanctioned and unsanctioned services, as well as open, exposed cloud buckets. A key example is finding that a cloud storage bucket is misconfigured and publicly accessible, which could expose sensitive customer data.
Online Sharing Exposure: ThreatNG investigates online platforms, such as Pastebin and GitHub, for any sensitive data inadvertently shared by employees or associated with the organization. This helps an organization identify potential data leaks and security risks from employee mistakes.
Reporting and Continuous Monitoring
ThreatNG’s reporting capabilities help an organization manage the findings of potential data leaks. It provides detailed reports on Data Leak Susceptibility and Code Secret Exposure, which can serve as evidence of potential data exfiltration vectors or compromised credentials. These reports include risk levels and recommendations for mitigation, enabling security teams to prioritize and guide remediation efforts effectively.
Continuous monitoring is a core component of ThreatNG's data leak prevention strategy. It enables an organization to monitor its external attack surface for new vulnerabilities, exposures, and threats that could lead to data leaks, ensuring they can be addressed before being exploited.
Investigation Modules
ThreatNG's investigation modules provide a deeper examination of potential data leak vectors.
Sensitive Code Exposure: This module scans public code repositories for various types of exposed sensitive information, including API keys, cloud credentials (such as an AWS Access Key ID), and database credentials. Discovering these exposed secrets enables an organization to secure them before they are exploited to access sensitive data.
Search Engine Exploitation: This module helps users investigate an organization’s susceptibility to exposing information via search engines. This can reveal sensitive information, public passwords, or vulnerable files that could be exploited in a data leak scam.
Dark Web Presence: This module monitors the dark web for mentions of the organization or its data, which can indicate potential data leaks or breaches.
Archived Web Pages: This module analyzes archived versions of an organization's online presence to uncover historical data leaks or vulnerabilities that may still be present.
Intelligence Repositories
ThreatNG’s DarCache intelligence repositories provide the foundational data for identifying and preventing data leak scams.
DarCache Rupture (Compromised Credentials): This repository is a database of usernames and emails that have been compromised in data breaches. This allows an organization to identify if its employee or customer credentials have been leaked and proactively force a password reset, which prevents them from being used in a data leak scam to gain unauthorized access.
DarCache Vulnerability: This repository provides intelligence on vulnerabilities, including their real-world exploitability and the likelihood of their use in an attack. It includes data from EPSS and KEV, which helps an organization prioritize patching the most critical vulnerabilities that could lead to a data leak.
Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG can work with complementary solutions to create a more comprehensive defense against data leak scams. For example, if ThreatNG's Sensitive Code Exposure module identifies a leaked API key, that information can be sent to a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system. The SIEM could then correlate this with internal logs to confirm if the key was used maliciously, which would help identify a data leak in real-time.
Additionally, the insights from ThreatNG's assessments and reports can be used to inform an Incident Response Platform, helping to track investigations, manage communication, and coordinate response activities in the event of a data leak.
