Rubrik security slip-up exposed masses of its corporate clients’ data


Connor Jones

30 Jan, 2019

Data management company Rubrik was found to have an unsecured server that exposed, in some cases, sensitive client information.

The server itself wasn’t password protected which meant that anyone who knew the location of the server could access it, according to TechCrunch. It held tens of gigabytes of data including client names, email addresses, email signatures and their case work.

Rubrik, which is valued at $3.3 billion, has some incredibly high-profile clients whose information was on the exposed database which include Deloitte, Shell and the NHS among others.

It wasn’t just the high-profile clients that belonged on the database, all of its corporate clients resided on there and the database was indexed on Shodan, a search engine for exposed devices and databases.

In addition to the names and contact details, contents of emails relating to issues and complaints between clients and Rubrik were also stored on the dedicated client portion of the exposed server. Some emails also included sensitive information about Rubrik’s clients’ setup and configuration.

Rubrik has said it took the database offline within an hour of becoming alerted to the issue, the data from which dated back to October 2018 according to email timestamps.

«While building a new solution for customer support, a sandbox environment containing a subset of our customer corporate contact information and support interaction data was potentially accessible for a brief period of time,» said a spokesperson for Rubrik. «We rectified this issue immediately.»

«We also confirmed that no customer-owned data was exposed,» the spokesperson added. «Other than the security researcher who discovered this issue, no one has accessed this environment».

This comes as fairly ironic news as Rubrik recently announced that it will expand into the security and compliance market.

On that note, you may have picked up on the fact that some of Rubrik’s clients are based in Europe which means GDPR could come into play. The data giant could face a fine of up to 4% of its annual global revenue for exposing data it is responsible for.

It would be a big blow to the up-and-coming star in data management which raised $261 million from venture capital firms earlier this month and was also listed in the top 5 IPO prospects for 2019 by Mosaic Score.