Massive Cloud Leak Exposes Alteryx, Experian, US Census Bureau Data

[12/21/2017 Updated with new statement from the US Census Bureau stating Alteryx only had access to publicly available data on census.gov]

A major data leak resulting from yet another misconfigured Amazon Web Services S3 storage bucket has exposed sensitive information of 123 million American households. The cloud repository included data from analytics firm Alteryx, reports the UpGuard Cyber Risk Team.

Also exposed were massive data sets belonging to Alteryx partners Experian, the consumer credit reporting agency, and the US Census Bureau. Information from Experian's ConsumerView marketing database and the 2010 US Census were leaked. Home addresses, contact information, financial histories, and analyses of purchasing behavior were publicly available.

The US Census Bureau reports the third-party company involved in this leak, Alteryx, only had access to publicly available data from census.gov, including published data from the US 2010 Census. The leak did not affect Census Bureau servers or data stored on its cloud services.

UpGuard's director of cyber risk research, Chris Vickery, found the AWS S3 bucket at the subdomain "alteryxdownload" containing sensitive data. The repository was configured to allow any AWS "Authenticated Users" to download its data, meaning anyone with a free Amazon AWS account could access the bucket's information.

"Taken together, this exposed data provide a highly detailed database of tens of millions of Americans' personal, financial, and private lives," UpGuard says. This leak is a "prime example" of how third-party vendor risk can lead to sensitive data exposure.

Read more details here.