Security firm UpGuard is remaining silent about the removal of a blog post from its website wherein it was claimed that a cloud-based data storage repository, used by business analytics software provider Birst, was left unsecured, resulting in data about financial services firm Capital One, among others, being exposed.
All that the site says is, "This post is currently unavailable. For any press inquiries, contact us at press@upguard.com". It has had that legend since Thursday morning.
Dan Barnhardt, a spokesman for Infor, the parent company of Birst which provides analytics for Capital One, wrote to iTWire today and said that the original story was based on a false premise and requested its removal. Given that UpGuard has not backed up its claims, iTWire has taken down the original story.
Barnhardt said: "A Birst employee placed a copy of certain non-production components of the Birst software in a publicly-available S3 bucket to provide a prospective customer in the financial services industry non-production, read-only access to the software (a proof-of-concept).
{loadposition sam08}"These components were not populated with data; no data from the financial institution was ever present in the test environment at any time, although the filename contained the name of the financial institution.
"Under Birst standard procedures, these software components should have been set up for distribution with authentication and access control enabled, but in this case was not.
"There was no 'data breach' or 'data leak' because at no time were any data, credentials, or configuration information from the financial institution compromised. Nevertheless, upon receiving notice in January, Birst immediately removed and disabled access to the Amazon S3 file.
"Because the premise of the article is based on factual inaccuracies, we ask that you remove it as UpGuard has done with the source blog post."
UpGuard pulled its blog post from the Web soon after Capital One reacted to the original story on Thursday and said the claims were untrue.
iTWire's original story was based on UpGuard's claims; feedback sent by Capital One was incoporated into the story.
UpGuard was then contacted for comment but the company did not respond.
A second contact was initiated this morning but thus far (midday AEDT Friday) UpGuard has stayed silent.
UpGuard has released several similar breach reports before this, many of which iTWire has reported on. There has been no denial of any of these claims.
CURRENT STATE OF SECURITY RESEARCH:
— Andrew Hay (@andrewsmhay) 28 February 2018
Step 1) Find exposed S3 bucket
Step 2) Create “research report”
Step 3) Disclose findings as if it were as important as the discovery of a cancer vaccine
Step 4) Get as much media attention as possible
Step 5) Sling your product
Step 6) Profit