Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has blamed “user error” for leaving a list of credentials online for more than a year that exposed access to sensitive patient data.
Mossab Hussein, chief security officer at cybersecurity startup SpiderSilk, told TechCrunch that a developer left the credentials for an AstraZeneca internal server on code sharing site GitHub in 2021. The credentials allowed access to a test Salesforce cloud environment, often used by businesses to manage their customers, but the test environment contained some patient data, Hussein said.
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Due to an [sic] user error, some data records were temporarily available on a developer platform. We stopped access to this data immediately after we have been [sic] informed. We are investigating the root cause as well as assessing our regulatory obligations.”
Barth declined to say for what reason patient data was stored on a test environment, and if AstraZeneca has the technical means, such as logs, to determine if anyone accessed the data and what, if any, data was exfiltrated.
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Source: AstraZeneca password lapse exposed patient data | TechCrunch
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