It’s been a frustrating matter, but it may finally be resolved, thanks to the individual known as @fs0ciety on Twitter.
In May 2019, DataBreaches.net was alerted to an online bloodbank in India that had a misconfigured Amazon s3 bucket. Despite repeated emails by this site and even a phone call from Banbreach infosec in India, the data remain exposed.
In August, this site noted it publicly but without naming the organization or pointing to the exposed data. They were Case 1 in this post.
And that’s where things remained until recently, when someone posted the donors database — with personal information on more than 1 million donors — on a web site where databases are shared. With the data now being freely traded and in light of mentions that it had originally been seen on a Russian forum, DataBreaches.net again attempted to get onlinebloodbank or Luminous Infoways to lock down the data properly.
To no avail.
DataBreaches.net reached out to “Elliott Alderson” (@fs0c131y on Twitter). On November 13, he tweeted to their inactive Twitter account:
Hi @obbredaccess,
A security issue has been found in your website. The personal data of millions of donors are exposed. You have been contacted multiple times by multiple people. Can you contact me by DMs to solve this issue.
Regards,
— Elliot Alderson (@fs0c131y) November 13, 2019
And that started a different ball rolling because of all the people who follow him.
@fs0c131y got results where this site had failed to. It is not known to this site whether someone finally got RED Access Associates (http://onlinebloodbank.com) or Luminous Infoways to respond, and who that party was who got through to them, but something worked.
Great thanks to @fs0c131y and all those who jumped in to help.
Of course, it should never take this long to get an entity to respond to a notification, and even for not-for-profits, there needs to be some genuine commitment to protecting personal and health information. What is the government of India doing to really encourage — and enforce — data security and data protection? I mean, what are they doing other than trying to criminalize and censor journalism about data security failures in India?