Roughly four million records containing the personal details of Time Warner Cable (TWC) customers were discovered stored on an Amazon server without a password late last month.
The files, more than 600GB in size, were discovered on August 24 by the
Kromtech Security Center while its researchers were investigating an unrelated data breach at World Wrestling Entertainment. Two Amazon S3 buckets were eventually found and linked to BroadSoft, a global communications company that partners with service providers, including AT&T and TWC.
Not all of the TWC records contained information about unique customers. Some contained duplicative information, meaning the breach ultimately exposed less than four million customers. Due to the size of the cache, however, the researchers could not immediately say precisely how many were affected. The leaked data included usernames, emails addresses, MAC addresses, device serial numbers, and financial transaction information—though it does not appear that any Social Security numbers or credit card information was exposed.
Time Warner Cable was purchased by Charter Communications last year and is now called Spectrum, though the leaked records date back from this year to at least 2010.
Other databases revealed billing addresses, phone numbers, and other contact info for at least hundreds of thousands of TWC subscribers. The servers also contained a slew of internal company records, including SQL database dumps, internal emails, and code containing credentials (usernames and passwords) to external systems—information that could’ve been used to uncover additional sensitive subscriber records.
