Florida Department of Economic Opportunity (DEO) has hit the news headlines for becoming a victim of a cyber attack that led to data breach of over 57,900 claimant accounts seeking unemployment benefits.
Highly placed sources say that the security breach was related to Reemployment Assistance Claims and Benefits Information System aka CONNECT, where hackers reportedly accessed information related to CONNECT Public Claims portal between April 27-July 16,2021.
Exposed data includes bank account numbers, addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, driving license numbers, social security numbers, and PIN used to access CONNECT accounts.
An email has been sent to all the affected users linked to CONNECT accounts requesting them to monitor their credit accounts for any suspected activity.
The US DEO Data Breach was disclosed exactly after a week when Web security firm WizCaze discovered a data breach that affected residents of over 80 US Cities through an exploit on Mobile Mapping software offering company PeopleGIS that led to the leak of over 1000GB data or over 1.6 million files from a mis-configured Amazon S3 Bucket.
Meanwhile, a digital advertising company named Reindeer from New York is trending on Google for accidental data exposure. The company that is now defunct has exposed information related to 300,000 of its customers that includes their Facebook IDs, residential info, contact numbers, email addresses, hashed passwords, usernames, surnames and DOBs.
Reindeer cannot be put to the complete fault in this incident as it was using Amazon Storage services to keep its customer data secure. So, when Wizcase, the web security platform that discovered the data breach, contacted Amazon S3 bucket, it did not acknowledge the incident and stated that an investigation is underway on the issue.
However, reporting sources confirm that over 32GB data or over 50,000 files were accessed from the S3 bucket that belonged to Reindeer.
Note- Remember, often such leaked details are used by cyber criminals to launch Vishing and phishing attacks, identity theft, social engineering attacks, brute force attacks and can also be sold on the dark web for a smart price.
