[BreachExchange] Cosmetics Giant Avon Leaks 19 Million Records

[Destry Winant]

https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/cosmetics-giant-avon-leaks-19/

A misconfigured cloud server at global cosmetics brand Avon was
recently discovered leaking 19 million records including personal
information and technical logs.

Researchers at SafetyDetectives led by Anurag Sen told Infosecurity
that they found the Elasticsearch database on an Azure server publicly
exposed with no password protection or encryption.

“The vulnerability effectively means that anyone possessing the
server’s IP address could access the company’s open database,” it
explained in a subsequent report.

The London-headquartered firm, which boasts over $5.5bn in annual
worldwide sales, was apparently exposing the 7GB database for nine
days before it was discovered on June 12.

It contained personally identifiable information (PII) on customers
and potentially employees, including full names, phone numbers, dates
of birth, email and home addresses, and GPS coordinates. Also included
in the haul were 40,000+ security tokens, OAuth tokens, internal logs,
account settings and technical server information.

While the PII could have been leveraged to commit a wide range of
identity fraud and follow-on phishing scams, the exposed technical
details also posed a risk to Avon, according to SafetyDetectives.

“Given the type and amount of sensitive information made available,
hackers would be able to establish full server control and conduct
severely damaging actions that permanently damage the Avon brand;
namely, ransomware attacks and paralyzing the company’s payments
infrastructure,” it argued.

Interestingly, a June 9 filing with the Securities and Exchange
Commission revealed the firm had suffered a “cyber-incident in its
information technology environment which has interrupted some systems
and partially affected operations.”

A second filing on June 12 claimed that the firm was planning a
restart of its systems.

“Avon is continuing the investigation to determine the extent of the
incident, including potential compromised personal data,” it
continued. “Nevertheless, at this point it does not anticipate that
credit card details were likely affected, as its main e-commerce
website does not store that information.”

It’s unclear whether the incident was linked to this exposed cloud
server or not.