Adobe Systems Inc. is the last company to expose customer data on an unsecured database, with 7.5 million Adobe Creative Cloud accounts found online.

Discovered by Comparitech Ltd. and security researcher Bob Diachenko and publicized Friday, the exposed Elasticsearch database was open to all and sundry, requiring no password or other security measures to access it.

The database included email addresses; account creation date; Adobe products used and subscription status; whether the user is an Adobe employee; member I.D.s; country; time since last login; and payment status. The data did not include any payment information or details such as credit cards.

The database was discovered Oct. 19, and Adobe was informed the same day and immediately movied to secure it. It’s unknown whether the data had been accessed by bad actors, but it’s estimated that the data had been exposed online for at least a week.

Adobe confirmed the data exposure, describing it as “a vulnerability related to work on one of our prototype environments.” The company added that “they promptly shut down the misconfigured environment, addressing the vulnerability” and were reviewing their development processes to prevent a similar issue occurring again.

“The exposure of 7.5 million Adobe Creative Cloud accounts gives cybercriminals more than enough data to commit effective phishing attacks and impersonation attempts,” Alexander García-Tobar, co-founder and chief executive officer of business email compromise protection firm Valimail Inc., told SiliconANGLE. “Knowing users’ email addresses, product subscriptions, payment statuses and login updates means their social engineering attacks can be highly tailored and therefore all the more convincing. If successful, these attacks can lead to account takeover, identity theft and other scams.”

Garcia-Tobar noted that phishing campaigns often follow such breaches, targeting the victims with fake security warnings that look like they came from the breached company. “In fact, 83 percent of phishing emails overall are brand or company impersonations,” he said. “Chief information security officers and chief information officers face a daunting task against a relentless wave of impersonation attacks.”

Photo: Adobe