Examine our research from the last year in the ReliaQuest 2024 Annual Cyber-Threat Report
Reduce Alert Noise and False Positives
Boost your team's productivity by cutting down alert noise and false positives.
Automate Security Operations
Boost efficiency, reduce burnout, and better manage risk through automation.
Dark Web Monitoring
Online protection tuned to the need of your business.
Maximize Existing Security Investments
Improve efficiencies from existing investments in security tools.
Beyond MDR
Move your security operations beyond the limitations of MDR.
Secure with Microsoft 365 E5
Boost the power of Microsoft 365 E5 security.
Secure Multi-Cloud Environments
Improve cloud security and overcome complexity across multi-cloud environments.
Secure Mergers and Acquisitions
Control cyber risk for business acquisitions and dispersed business units.
Operational Technology
Solve security operations challenges affecting critical operational technology (OT) infrastructure.
Force-Multiply Your Security Operations
Whether you’re just starting your security journey, need to up your game, or you’re not happy with an existing service, we can help you to achieve your security goals.
Detection Investigation Response
Modernize Detection, Investigation, Response with a Security Operations Platform.
Threat Hunting
Locate and eliminate lurking threats with ReliaQuest GreyMatter
Threat Intelligence
Find cyber threats that have evaded your defenses.
Model Index
Security metrics to manage and improve security operations.
Breach and Attack Simulation
GreyMatter Verify is ReliaQuest’s automated breach and attack simulation capability.
Digital Risk Protection
Continuous monitoring of open, deep, and dark web sources to identify threats.
Phishing Analyzer
GreyMatter Phishing Analyzer removes the abuse mailbox management by automating the DIR process for you.
Integration Partners
The GreyMatter cloud-native Open XDR platform integrates with a fast-growing number of market-leading technologies.
Unify and Optimize Your Security Operations
ReliaQuest GreyMatter is a security operations platform built on an open XDR architecture and designed to help security teams increase visibility, reduce complexity, and manage risk across their security tools, including on-premises, clouds, networks, and endpoints.
Blog
Company Blog
Case Studies
Brands of the world trust ReliaQuest to achieve their security goals.
Data Sheets
Learn how to achieve your security outcomes faster with ReliaQuest GreyMatter.
eBooks
The latest security trends and perspectives to help inform your security operations.
Industry Guides and Reports
The latest security research and industry reports.
Podcasts
Catch up on the latest cybersecurity podcasts, and mindset moments from our very own mental performance coaches.
Solution Briefs
A deep dive on how ReliaQuest GreyMatter addresses security challenges.
White Papers
The latest white papers focused on security operations strategy, technology & insight.
Videos
Current and future SOC trends presented by our security experts.
Events & Webinars
Explore all upcoming company events, in-person and on-demand webinars
ReliaQuest ResourceCenter
From prevention techniques to emerging security trends, our comprehensive library can arm you with the tools you need to improve your security posture.
Threat Research
Get the latest threat analysis from the ReliaQuest Threat Research Team. ReliaQuest ShadowTalk Weekly podcast featuring discussions on the latest cybersecurity news and threat research.
Shadow Talk
ReliaQuest's ShadowTalk is a weekly podcast featuring discussions on the latest cybersecurity news and threat research. ShadowTalk's hosts come from threat intelligence, threat hunting, security research, and leadership backgrounds providing practical perspectives on the week's top cybersecurity stories.
March 26, 2024
About ReliaQuest
We bring our best attitude, energy and effort to everything we do, every day, to make security possible.
Leadership
Security is a team sport.
No Show Dogs Podcast
Mental Performance Coaches Derin McMains and Dr. Nicole Detling interview world-class performers across multiple industries.
Make It Possible
Make It Possible reflects our focus on bringing cybersecurity awareness to our communities and enabling the next generation of cybersecurity professionals.
Careers
Join our world-class team.
Press and Media Coverage
ReliaQuest newsroom covering the latest press release and media coverage.
Become a Channel Partner
When you partner with ReliaQuest, you help deliver world-class cybersecurity solutions.
Contact Us
How can we help you?
A Mindset Like No Other in the Industry
Many companies tout their cultures; at ReliaQuest, we share a mindset. We focus on four values every day to make security possible: being accountable, helpful, adaptable, and focused. These values drive development of our platform, relationships with our customers and partners, and further the ReliaQuest promise of security confidence across our customers and our own teams.
More results...
With Equifax‘s breach of 145 million records still fresh in everyone’s memory and the recent Facebook data privacy controversy, protecting personal data has become part of the political, economic and cultural zeitgeist. Debates over how data can be misused are now commonplace, and newsfeeds are awash with stores of “yet another breach of personal information”. There’s a reason for this; data is a valuable commodity, and there’s a lot of money to be made from trading personal information or using it for fraud. Cybercriminals are therefore continuing to launch phishing campaigns and network intrusions designed to collect personal data.
However, our latest research report, “Too Much Information”, highlights that there is a large amount of personal data already exposed that puts your employees and customers at risk. This data is unintentionally made public through misconfigured Amazon S3 buckets, rsync, SMB, FTP, NAS drives, and misconfigured websites. Let’s focus on a few examples that illustrate the extent of this exposure.
Today is tax deadline day, which means there are still people scrambling to submit their tax returns. This window affords criminals opportunities to commit tax return fraud. As we talked about in a previous blog, “It’s Accrual World: Tax Return Fraud in 2018”, criminals go to great lengths to acquire this information. Spoiler alert: there’s plenty of information already out there.
Figure 1: Types of publicly-available personal information
In fact, the most common employee data found in our research was payroll and tax return files, which accounted for 700,000 and 60,000 files respectively. Looking into many of these examples, it was common for this information to be exposed through a contractor – for instance, a boutique accounting firm that backed up their client information. A redacted exposed pay stub is shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: A redacted example of an exposed pay stub
Aside from financial information, there was also a strong medicinal flavor to the findings. Almost 5000 patient lists were publicly available. Most surprisingly, we found over two million .dcm files (2,205,350) exposed on an open SMB port based in Italy. These Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) files enable the creation and storage of medical tests, like MRIs, that contain personal health information. That’s an awful lot of files, and it doesn’t get much more personal than that.
Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and Personal Data are two terms that are often used interchangeably. PII is mainly used in the U.S. and is defined by NIST as:
“Any information about an individual maintained by an agency, including (1) any information that can be used to distinguish or trace an individual‘s identity, such as name, social security number, date and place of birth, mother‘s maiden name, or biometric records; and (2) any other information that is linked or linkable to an individual, such as medical, educational, financial, and employment information.”.
Pretty comprehensive, right? Well, not as comprehensive as “personal data”, which broadens the definition to include things like device ID, IP addresses, and cookies. Personal data is used as part of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) definition, which comes fully into place next month.
Our research found that a significant portion of the exposed data was in the European Union (537,720,919 files). With GDPR firmly on the horizon, organizations must consider how they are protecting employee and consumer information across these services. With employees and contractors often backing up and archiving data on their home networks or using cloud storage solutions, organizations need to ensure they have visibility into all the potential areas their customers’ personal data may be exposed. Out of sight may mean out of mind, but with GDPR coming into force, this could also mean organizations may soon be “out of pocket”.
Figure 3: The top countries making up the 500 million exposed files in the European Union
To learn more about the other types of sensitive data that these services are exposing, download a copy of our report. You can also find out more about the implications of GDPR in our “Path to Compliance” paper.
Want more Digital Shadows (now ReliaQuest) research? Subscribe to our threat intelligence emails here.