![]() “It’s a concern, but I’ve made peace with that and you can’t live your life in fear,” he said. Asked whether he’s worried that some clueless organization or overzealous prosecutor might come after him for computer hacking, Vickery said he’s not concerned (for background, see the controversy over bone-headed cases brought against researchers under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act). Vickery said he was able to connect to the database that Shodan turned up for him just by cutting and pasting the information into a commercial tool built to browse Mongo databases. “I didn’t know it was some sort of scamming scareware or software that pushes itself on people. “The funny thing is, I don’t even own a Mac, and I had never heard of MacKeeper until last night,” Vickery said. But Vickery said he doubts that’s the case, because some of the Shodan records he found that pointed back to Kromtech’s database were dated mid-November 2015. Vickery said Kromtech told him its database had been inadvertently exposed as a result of a server misconfiguration that was introduced just last week. “The only customer information we retain are name, products ordered, license information, public ip address and their user credentials such as product specific usernames, password hashes for the customer’s web admin account where they can manage subscriptions, support, and product licenses.” We do not collect any sensitive personal information of our customers,” the statement continues. “Billing information is not transmitted or stored on any of our servers. Kromtech said all customer credit card and payment information is processed by a 3rd party merchant and was never at risk. We have been in communication with Chris and he has not shared or used the data inappropriately.” Analysis of our data storage system shows only one individual gained access performed by the security researcher himself. ![]() “We fixed this error within hours of the discovery. “Some 13 million customer records leaked from is aware of a potential vulnerability in access to our data storage system and we are grateful to the security researcher Chris Vickery who identified this issue without disclosing any technical details for public use,” the company said in a statement published to its site totday. Vickery said he reached out the company, which responded quickly by shuttering public access to its user database, and publicly thanking him for reporting it. “But there’s a lot of stuff that should definitely not be out there, and when I come across those I try to notify the owner of the affected database.” “There are a lot of interesting, educating and intriguing things that you can find on Shodan,” Vickery said. In short order, Vickery’s request turned up four different Internet addresses, all of which he later learned belonged to Kromtech, the company that makes MacKeeper. Port 27017 happens to be associated with MongoDB, a popular database management system. “Ports” are like doorways that govern access into and out of specific areas of a server, and each port number generally maps to one or a handful of known Web applications and services. Vickery told Shodan to find all known instances of database servers listening for incoming connections on port 27017. IT helpdesk guy by day and security researcher by night, 31-year-old Chris Vickery said he unearthed the 21 gb trove of MacKeeper user data after spending a few bored moments searching for database servers that require no authentication and are open to external connections. Perhaps more interestingly, the guy who found and reported the breach doesn’t even own a Mac, and discovered the data trove merely by browsing Shodan - a specialized search engine that looks for and indexes virtually anything that gets connected to the Internet. The makers of MacKeeper - a much-maligned software utility many consider to be little more than scareware that targets Mac users - have acknowledged a breach that exposed the usernames, passwords and other information on more than 13 million customers and, er…users. ![]()
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