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300K usernames and passwords exposed on Ancestry.com RootsWeb server
Ancestry.com LLC is the latest company to expose confidential user data to the broader internet.
A security researcher discovered a file containing usernames and passwords sitting on a server on Rootsweb.com, an Ancestry-owned family history site. The data included 300,000 email addresses/username and password combinations relating to RootsWeb users but also 7,000 Ancestry.com accounts, the company said Saturday. The RootsWeb data was older data, since the service was “retired” earlier this year but the website remains as “a favor to the community.”
On a positive side, Ancestry.com did note that the exposed RootsWeb data did not include credit card numbers or social security numbers. The company added that it was in the process of informing customers of the data exposure, including Ancestry.com users who had used the same username/password combinations on both services.
What isn’t clear from the data breach disclosure is exactly how it came about. The company claims that “someone was able to create the file of older RootsWeb usernames and passwords as a direct result of how part of this open community was set up,” which could mean the data was accessed because of a security failure. But that doesn’t explain why someone external to the company would create a file with the data and then leave it sitting on the server.
Although it may have been a case of hacking, it also could have been a case of accidental data exposure, something that became all too common in the second half of 2017. The company doesn’t state that the data was hosted on an Amazon Web Services Inc. server instance, but it is an AWS customer, saying in a press release in June that it was migrating all of its applications and data to AWS.
If it was yet another case of a misconfigured AWS S3 instance, Ancestry.com is in esteemed company. Alteryx Inc. was the most recent company to expose data via misconfiguration Dec. 19, and those before it include Accenture PLC, Verizon Communications Inc., Dow Jones & Co., military contractor TigerSwan and defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton Inc.
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