SeniorAdvisor that offers trusted reviews to online users looking for senior care was exposed to hackers when a data storage server related to Amazon Web Services was wrongly configured, disclosing the data of over 3 million senior citizens.
Wizcaze that offers evaluation service of Cybersecurity tools was the first to find the data exposure committed by SeniorAdvisor and informed the latter about the incident in the first week of June this year.
As the management of the senior citizen care reviewer did not react to the alert, a warning was again posted to the management of SeniorAdvisor by Wizcase in the third week of the same month.
Later, the company alerted SeniorAdvisor through a tech journalist, after which the mis-configured AWS bucket was reconfigured.
Security experts say that the time frame of 3-4 weeks is enough for hackers to sniff the data leak and access the details like surnames & contact info, such as emails and phone numbers.
Concernedly, the data breach could put senior citizens to extreme hardships by using their data to commit cyber frauds via phishing emails, where hackers in disguise of government officials can fox the senior citizens in revealing their bank account details, eventually leading to siphoning of money from bank accounts.
Note- Interestingly, both the companies are involved in the business of sharing reviews on service or products. SeniorAdvisor is related to senior citizens’ care and the other (Wizcase) is about the security tools and services like Anti virus software, VPNs, Parental control tools, and other software like WhatsApp desktop app review, Microsoft word and excel software details.
