A hacker of unknown background has leaked personal information belonging to millions of customers of Indian consumer electronics maker boAt.
The company is India's leading manufacturer of wireless audio and wearables.According to his company, boAt will control about 26% of the wearable market in 2023. Data from IDC. As of 2022, he sells nearly 40% of all earphones in the country. This is more than five times his closest competitor. Counterpoint Research data.
An attacker going by the name 'ShopifyGUY' published 2GB worth of files on the dark web on April 5th. According to reports. The file contained approximately 7.5 million entries. Personally Identifiable Information (PII) boAt Information about customers (including name, address, telephone number, email, etc.).
All of them were listed for as little as $2, which may raise doubts about the authenticity of the data. However, multiple news organizations have since contacted a sample of affected customers to confirm that the information is correct.
Dark Reading has reached out to boAt's security team to confirm the details of the attack, but has not yet received a response.
Preventing customer data leaks
To prevent such attacks, Darren Williams, CEO and founder of BlackFog, suggests that businesses invest in anti-bleach tools.
“Data leak prevention is about looking for data that leaves your network and running AI on all of it to see if it's a legitimate request,” he explains. Programs trained to do this job do so based on dozens of contextual and operational parameters to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate traffic.
That said, he added that there are even simpler, lower-tech steps companies can take to make simple breaches more complex.
“In a mature organization, the basic requirements for security are:” he explains. Data encryption at rest. That way, if someone accesses your database, it won't be a problem since they won't be able to decrypt it anyway. So it's interesting to me that in this day and age, people aren't taking the very basic step of encrypting their databases.
“It's not difficult. It takes 30 seconds. Just press the on button. It'll make you think.” [boAt] I fell asleep while driving. ”