Brazil"s Natura & Co Cosmetics Accidentally Exposes Personal Details of 192 Million Customers

Nobody gets a free pass when it comes to data breaches. Natura, one of Brazil”s largest cosmetics companies, accidentally exposed the personal identifiable information (PII) of nearly 192 million customers.

The leaky database, discovered last month by Safety Detectives led by cybersecurity researcher Anurag Seg, was hosted on two unprotected US-based Amazon servers, and contained between 272GB and 1.3TB of data belonging to the company.

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In yesterday”s report, the researchers noted that more than “250,000 customers that had previously ordered beauty products from the website had their personal information made available to the public without Natura”s knowledge.”

To make matters worse, payment information of 40,000 shoppers “related to a third-party company, Wirecard, was also publicly available for over 2 weeks.”

Upon discovery, the team immediately notified the company, which managed to secure its servers and remove any private date from public view. However, the researchers published their findings in the report, revealing the extent of the data leak:

• Full name, mother”s maiden name and date of birth
• Nationality, gender and telephone numbers
• Natura.com.br login credentials including hashed passwords
• Welcome email template
• Username and nickname
• MOIP account details
• API credentials including unencrypted passwords
• Previous purchases
• Email and physical addresses
• Access token for wirecard.com.br

The exposed login credentials (usernames and hashed passwords) could allow hackers “to find the correct password for each user by brute forcing the hash and obtaining full access to customers” accounts,” the analysists said.

Attackers could also inflict financial damage to shoppers by exploiting the leaked physical addresses, phone numbers, and other PII. In one scenario, researchers said a bad actor could use the “mother”s maiden names to answer security questions and potentially access email accounts and cloud services that could in turn be used maliciously to gain deeper access to someone” private information.”

“The risk of phishing and phone scams is also raised by the Natura data leak,” while leveraging the welcome email templates could aid potential phishing scams, leaving victims “under the false impression the email originated from Natura.”

As a reminder, a recent analysis of consumer behavior revealed a worrying trend: 42% of consumers believe the information available in their online account is not “valuable enough to be worth a hacker”s time.” Cyber-crooks profit from the common notion that no cyber-criminal would be after personal information stored on a cosmetics company website or other source.

Last year, cosmetic giants Yves-Rocher and Sephora also made headlines with data breaches that exposed the personal details of millions of their customers. In Sephora”s case, the stolen data was posted for sale on the dark web.