New research by Digital Shadows shows that the number of files exposed by misconfigured online file-sharing services surged by 50% since March of last year. Currently, a staggering 2.3 billion files are accessible, from 1.5 billion last year. With a total of 326 million records, the US tops the list of countries exposing data.
Server Message Block (SMB) file shares accounted for almost half (46%) of the exposed data. This service is followed by FTP (20%), rsync (16%), Amazon S3 storage buckets (8%), webindex (7%) and network-attached storage (NAS) devices (3%). SMB is the file, device and port-sharing service used by Microsoft Windows operating systems. Harrison Van Riper of Digital Shadows warns that “as businesses continue to digitize older systems and [processes], and more and more Windows systems that have SMB installed get spun up, the more chances there are for these exposures to occur knowingly.”
