SANS Institute Disclosed Data Breach

SANS Institute is a cybersecurity coaching institute, where it offers security training and certifications. The platform has a significant following around the world. On Tuesday, the for-profit training platform has disclosed a data breach into their network, where an employee of its team has fallen victim for a phishing email. When performing their systematic review of email configurations on August 6th, they identified a suspicious forwarding rule which is tuned to forward all the emails sent to the victim’s (employee’s) inbox. Since then, about 518 emails containing 28,000 records of SANS members were transferred to the unknown external email account. The details in those forwarded emails contain personally identifiable information like the first name and last name, email ID, company name, work title, industry, address, and country of residence. SANS quickly stopped any further forwarding and deployed its instructors to investigate the incident. And in the initial investigations, SANS said they found no other account has compromised and assured the leaked information didn’t contain any sensitive data like passwords or financial information like credit cards. Further, it said to be tightening the security whenever possible and would run a webcast after the investigation to share the learned details. The company has also mentioned an OAuth add-on being found in their investigation but didn’t explain much about it. Finally, it said to have informed all the affected members and advised to monitor for any potential attacks.

SANS Institute Disclosed Data Breach That Leaked 28 000 Records - 59