Another Massive Data Leakage Incident Reported

We shouldn't be surprised by this anymore, and regular readers know I've talked about the risks of data leakage on multiple occasions. This has the same characteristics as HospitalGown and Eavesdropper: the app itself is not necessarily insecure; instead, the cloud-based storage system hasn't been properly secured.

The app in this case is A.I.type Keyboard, available on both Google Play and the App Store. This threat was discovered by The Kromtech Security Center. What they learned was that the A.I.type Keyboard app leaked PII and other data from over 31 million users. The root cause appears to be that the app's backend, a 577 GB MongoDB database, was misconfigured so that all of it's data is available to anyone with an Internet connection.

What is included in the exposed 577 GB? Here's a partial rundown:

Phone number, full name of the owner, device name and model, mobile network name, SMS number, screen resolution, user languages enabled, Android version, IMSI number (international mobile subscriber identity used for interconnection), IMEI number (a unique number given to every single mobile phone), emails associated with the phone, country of residence, links and the information associated with the social media profiles (birthdate, title, emails etc.) and photo (links to Google+, Facebook etc.), IP (if available), location details (long/lat).

In addition, there were over 6 million records that contained "data collected from users’ contact books, including names (as entered originally) and phone numbers, in total more than 373 million records scraped from registered users’ phones, which include all their contacts saved/synced on linked Google account."

Ouch. One of the things that's a bit unusual--and pretty insidious-- is the information associated with social media profiles. This should enable a second level of privacy invasion and surveillance against the victims. Given how valuable data is to marketers as well as black hats, this data will no doubt find its way into various commercial and dark net datasets, so be used at some future date with almost zero chance of tracing it back to the offending app.

Well, at least it's not mobile malware, right? So we shouldn't worry, correct? We'll see what kind of media coverage this gets.

Eavesdropper: Can You Hear Me Now?

Appthority released research today on a newly discovered vulnerability dubbed Eavesdropper. This is yet another case where enterprise data is leaked from mobile devices, in this scenario by legitimate app developers failing to secure cloud storage (specifically, by including hard coded credentials in mobile applications that are using the Twilio REST API or SDK).

Quoting from Appthority's blog,

Eavesdropper does not rely on a jailbreak or root of the device, take advantage of a known OS vulnerability, or attack via malware. 

In other words, Eavesdropper does not result from malicious code on the mobile device. The vulnerability is app developer error, pure and simple, and the exposure is not on the device but in the cloud. But this error, multiplied by hundreds of apps and millions of downloads, causes text/SMS messages, call metadata, and voice recordings to be exposed to any and all comers. Once the data is exposed, malicious actors can easily find it and launch an attack based on that data. The "attack" may be cyber or it may be in the real world, based on proprietary knowledge acquired from the exposed enterprise data.

Headlines about the latest malware threat get our attention, but there are no known malware attacks that have exposed nearly the amount of data--measured in terabytes--as Eavesdropper and HospitalGown. As we've noted previously, data leakage from mobile devices is a real, demonstrable threat but enterprises often focus on malware and legacy endpoint paradigms. A broader perspective than simply a focus on the device is required to detect and remediation such threats and protect enterprise data.