250,000 Sensitive Legal Documents Leaked Online via Unprotected Elasticsearch Cluster
March 17, 2019 Share

250,000 Sensitive Legal Documents Leaked Online via Unprotected Elasticsearch Cluster

Security researchers discovered 257,287 legal documents from unprotected Elasticsearch cluster that hosted on a US-based Amazon AWS server.

The unprotected sensitive documents labeled as “not designated for publication'” and the data contains 4.7GB highly sensitive legal documents.

Further investigation reveals that the data managed by Lex Machina, an IP litigation research company and division of LexisNexis.

LexisNexis responsible for develops legal analytics data and software, and sent them a security notification alert.

This unprotected Elasticsearch cluster discovered by Bob Diachenko, security researcher from securitydiscovery and the research is part of
identify and alert organizations that are misconfiguring noSql databases, such as MongoDB, CouchDB, Elasticsearch etc.

All the 250K sensitive documents were publicly available at the time when researcher discovered this unprotected Elasticsearch cluster let any one can access the all the files.

Researcher said, “However, upon a closer look at the cluster’s digital footprint, I tend to assume that database in question was handled by a company named LexSphere (based in India) which provides legal outsourcing services to a law firm called LexVisio.”

These unprotected server allows cyber criminals to take control the complete systems admin privilege and also high possibilities to install the malware and ransomware even attackers execute the code to take control the server remotely to steal and destroy the stored files.

This post 250,000 Sensitive Legal Documents Leaked Online via Unprotected Elasticsearch Cluster originally appeared on GB Hackers.