Veeam Leaks 200 GB Customer Database, Goldmine for Phishers

A database containing 200 gigabytes of customer data, estimated to harbor around 445 million records, has been exposed online by backup and recovery company Veeam, thanks to an improperly secured server hosted on Amazon.

The database apparently contained names, email address, IP addresses, referrer URL addresses, customer organization size, and much more. Security researcher Bob Diachenko, who found and reported the findings, believes this information could be extremely valuable to spammers conducting phishing campaigns, as no sensitive financial information seems to have been bundled in the database.goldmine

“Even taking into account the non-sensitivity of data, the public availability of such large, structured and targeted dataset online could become a real treasure chest for spammers and phishers,” wrote Diachenko. “It is also a big luck that database was not hit by a new wave of ransomware attacks which have been specifically targeting MongoDBs (with much more extortion amount demand than it was last year).”

The IP address of the Amazon server seems to have been indexed by the Shodan search engine, known to be used to identify poorly secured internet-connected devices, starting August 31^st. Although the researcher came across it on September 5^th, it wasn”t until September 9^th that the server seems to have been quietly pulled offline after repeated notifications by Diachenko and TechCrunch”s Zack Whittaker.

The entire database apparently contained information dating from 2013 all the way to 2017, and it was potentially used by Veeams marketing infrastructure.

“Based on the collection names and analysis of data in the database, my first guess was that database originated from Marketo server, so I also sent security notifications to their email addresses,” wrote Diachenko. “However, upon further analysis I came to conclusion that data was part of Veeam marketing server infrastructure, rather than Marketo.”

A Veeam spokesperson, Heidi Kroft, recently stated that “We will continue to conduct a deeper investigation and we will take appropriate actions based on our findings.”