This UK pub chain left 17,000 customer details exposed online
The personal details of thousands of beer drinkers were left exposed thanks to a Wi-Fi provider proving leakier than a smashed pint glass.
Brewhouse & Kitchen is a small chain of pubs with 23 locations across the UK. These include locations in London, Nottingham, Chester, Cardiff and Bristol.
Patrons attempting to access its free Wi-Fi were asked to hand over their names, emails, date of birth, phone numbers and other personal details. Oliver Hough, an independent security researcher, stumbled across a spreadsheet file containing more than 17,000 such records on an open directory hosted by Brewhouse's Wi-Fi provider, Focus Group.
"Looking for potential data breaches is somewhat of a hobby, at the time I was looking for open directories," he says. Finding the open directory was "pretty easy as the server was indexed on the Shodan search engine." Shodan is a search engine for internet connected devices, handy for researchers looking for anything that shouldn't be online.
The Brewhouse database included which pub the users logged into and when — and whether the customer wanted to be added to marketing lists (the majority of people said). "Phone numbers, email addresses could be used in scams or phishing campaigns," Hough says. "The other details such as date of birth, device type etc can be used to add legitimacy to a scam."
There's nothing to suggest scammers or hackers have downloaded the data. It was merely left exposed online for anyone with the technical know how to access.
Hough contacted Brewhouse on November 9; five days later, the directory was removed from open access. Both companies said they've contacted the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) to report the incident.
"Focus Group were made aware of a possible breach of Brewhouse & Kitchen's data on November 14 2018. We have subsequently followed our GDPR policy and are in the process of notifying the ICO," Focus Group's director Vicki Rishbeth said in an emailed statement.
Brewhouse & Kitchen said in a statement that it had worked with Focus Group to identify the source of the breach and stopped the leak. "We consider the management of our customers’ personal data to be the utmost priority, the incident in question has prompted a stringent review of the systems and infrastructure in place across all of our sites by our contracted service provider, ensuring a repeat or similar situation cannot arise again," the statement added.
source wired
Industry: Cyber Security News
Latest Jobs
-
- Outside IR 35 contract- Threat & vulnerability analyst - SC CLEARED UK REMOTE
- N/A
- £550
-
6 month rolling contract Outside IR35- immediate start. Threat and Vulnerability Analyst. Tenable.sc experience needed. The ability to deploy agent, configure environments, run active and passive scans, produce reports and prioritise remediation activities based on output Current and ACTIVE clearance is required
-
- Chief Information Security Officer- CISO. London
- London
- N/A
-
Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) is needed to join a senior leadership team that is driving change across a London based FTSE business. You will have responsibility and accountability to define and execute an information & Cyber Security strategy. To be successful you should have the following experience; Experience defining, presenting and executing against your information AND cyber security strategy. Experience delivering / managing functions across information security GRC / Audit and technical Cyber Security capabilities. Senior stakeholder management to the executive committee. Embedding Info / cyber security within a Cloud focused environment. Further develop, expand and mature the information / cyber security function | team. Be able to regularly commute to London Financial services experience is desirable. If this sounds like an opportunity you are interested in then please use the below form to schedule a call. This is an exclusive project to DCL Search. All conversations are kept in confidence.
-
- IAM Business Analyst- ForgeRock
- European Union
- £500 per day
-
IAM Business Analyst with ForgeRock experience is need for a 12 months contract The client is in the middle of a large scale ForgeRock deployment and the BA will sit between the technical teams and the business helping to ensure the project is a success You will need to be a strong business communicator and have experience of mapping business needs against ForgeRock features This will be a remote project dealing with teams in different geographies, you must have strong English communications skills and be happy working remotely and able to be proactive to ensure your side of the project is a success
-
- Java Developer
- United Kingdom
- upto £55,000 plus good benefits
-
Home based opportunity for an experinced Java Developer to become involved in a number of large scale national IAM projects Duties include · Development and maintenance of source code for our customers IAM deployments · Have a good understanding of testing frameworks and methodologies and are able to test solutions within you own work and others · Ability to create clean code according to good coding standards · Create easy to follow documentation You don' need to have experience within the Identity Access Management space but it would be beneficial we are looking for people with · Java experienced ideally Java 11 · preferably experience in some of the following: Maven, Gradle, PHP, Lua scripting, C#, Spring Boot/Spring, OGNL, or Groovy · experience of working with one or more of: creating/consuming REST APIs LDAP SQL encryption Identity Protocols (SAML, OAuth, OIDC, SCIM etc) · good knowledge of development methodologies with regards to the end user experience For more details please send your CV and we will come back to you