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Months After Being Notified, a Software Vendor is Still Exposing Confidential and Sealed Court Records

By: Dissent
13 October 2025 at 15:49
In a special edition of β€œNo need to hack when it’s leaking,” DataBreaches reports on a software vendor that, despite multiple attempts by multiple parties, continues to expose confidential and sealed court records.Β  Overview As a matter of policy, DataBreaches does not publish unredacted stolen or leaked data if it would expose personally identifiable or...

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Researchers determine old vulnerabilities pose real-world threat to sensitive data in public clouds

11 August 2025 at 16:47

Using a seven-year-old vulnerability, researchers said they were able to realistically leak private data from public clouds, suggesting that a β€œlack of concern” about such supposedly impractical attacks is misguided, according to a presentation delivered Monday.

The anonymous researchers presented their findings at a hacker conference, WHY2025, in the Netherlands, and they leaned on the kind of β€œtransient execution” vulnerabilities that attracted attention in 2018 with high-profile Intel chip flaw revelations, one of which was known as Spectre.

β€œGiven that today’s clouds have large fleets of older CPUs that lack comprehensive, in-silicon fixes to a variety of transient execution vulnerabilities, the question arises whether sufficient software-based defenses have been deployed to stop realistic attacks β€” especially those using older, supposedly mitigated vulnerabilities,” they wrote. The answer to that question is β€œno,” they concluded. β€œWe show that the practice of mitigating vulnerabilities in isolation, without removing the root cause, leaves systems vulnerable.”

The findings demonstrate that β€œmore than a theoretical possibility, this is a real-world threat in popular clouds,” they explained, unlike the Spectre vulnerability that hasn’t had much real-world applicability.Β 

β€œFor regular users, these CPU vulnerabilities are likely not that much of a threat,” the researchers said. β€œHowever, that is not the case for public cloud providers. Their business model is to provide remote code execution as a service [emphasis theirs], and to rent out shared hardware resources as efficiently as possible.”

The researchers said they worked within dedicated host systems of Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services to avoid any actual harm. AWS was able to restrict leakage to non-sensitive host data. Google paid a more than $150,000 bounty, the highest its cloud vulnerability reward program has ever doled out.

Both companies have patched the exploit and plan future security steps.

β€œOur conclusion is not that AWS’s and Google’s security was lacking, but that they are actively stimulating security improvements,” the researchers said.

The researchers dubbed the attack β€œL1TF Reloaded,” after another 2018 Intel chip data-stealing vulnerability.

In a blog post, Amazon β€” which noted that it sponsored a portion of the work β€” said the research was β€œimpressive” but that the L1TF Reloaded vulnerability does not impact the guest data of AWS customers running on the AWS Nitro System or Nitro Hypervisor.

A Google spokesperson pointed to a security bulletin the company issued.

β€œWhen this vulnerability was initially discovered, Google immediately implemented mitigations to address the known risks. Since then, we have collaborated with security researchers from academia to assess the current state of CPU security mitigations, and new attack techniques,” the spokesperson said. β€œWe applied new fixes to the affected assets, including Google Cloud, to mitigate the issue.”

While such vulnerabilities have previously caused little concern, the researchers wrote that β€œwe question this lack of concern and show not only that practical attacks on modern clouds are possible, but that they are possible with vulnerabilities we considered mitigated 7 years ago.”

The post Researchers determine old vulnerabilities pose real-world threat to sensitive data in public clouds appeared first on CyberScoop.

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