UPDATED 22:06 EDT / JANUARY 03 2019

SECURITY

Blur password manager exposes 2.4M users on misconfigured AWS cloud instance

Abine Inc., the company behind the Blue password manager and DeleteMe privacy-protection service, has admitted that it accidentally exposed data relating to 2.4 million users on a misconfigured Amazon Web Services Inc. instance.

The company made the announcement on Dec. 31, making it the last AWS storage issue of the year. The file with user data was discovered on Dec. 13.

The data in the file related to Blur users who had signed up prior to Jan. 6, 2018, and included usernames, emails, password hints and the last and second-to-last IP addresses that were used to log in to Blur.

Passwords were also in the file but were encrypted for every user. The security key was not included in the exposed document.

“There is no evidence that the usernames and passwords stored by our users in Blur, auto-fill credit card details, Masked Emails, Masked Phone numbers, and Masked Credit Card numbers were exposed,” Abine wrote in a blog post Monday. “There is no evidence that user payment information was exposed.”

While finding no evidence that the document had been accessed, Abine is nonetheless warning users that their accounts may have been compromised. Users are being asked to reset their master passwords for Blur and to set up two-factor authentication as an additional security measure.

Blur is not the first password manager to have had security issues. LastPass was infamously hacked in 2015 before having to issue an urgent patch in 2017 after it was discovered that plugins related to the product could expose customer passwords.

LastPass, though, was a different case because it was specifically targeted by hackers. The fact that a company offering password protection software would “accidentally” expose user data on an AWS S3 instance is a different level of incompetence.

“As a privacy and security-focused company this incident is embarrassing and frustrating,” the company conceded. “These incidents should not happen and we let our users down. We apologize and are working very hard to ensure we respond quickly and effectively to this incident and make sure we do everything we can to not let anything like it happen again.”

Image: Abine

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