
Confidential data stored with cloud providers Box and Dropbox has been leaked, leading to one industry professional saying he believes it is shocking that businesses still use no-cost file-sharing software.
Intralinks, a New York-based competitor of the two companies involved, discovered the flaw after it performed an evaluation of traffic in Analytics using data from a Google Adwords report, which looks at web content, page views and the performance of Google Ads.
It was the Google data which revealed that third-party links had been sent by a number of firm’s main competitors.
Intralinks, like many other digital media firms, runs a Google AdWords campaign which sees its ads show up in Google when users search for rival companies. For example, if a user searched for Dropbox, they will see an Intralinks ad appear and may be tempted to click on it.
The company commented in a blog post:
“During a routine analysis of Google AdWords and Google Analytics data mentioning competitors’ names (Dropbox and Box), we inadvertently discovered the fully clickable URLs necessary to access these documents that led us to live folder contents, some with sensitive data.”
Graham Cluley, an independent security researcher, said it has been hard to work out why Google Ads located such sensitive and private links but that it could be due to share link or hyperlinks vulnerability.
It is important for companies to be aware of flaws in any applications they are using to store confidential data. Free software may come with an obvious benefit, but could prove costly in other ways long-term. Investing in the right personnel by posting information security jobs could eradicate exposure to many issues where potential data breaches are concerned.
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