Hackers have begun selling data obtained from Asian data centres from large tech corporations.
The login credentials were from the data centres in Asia used by some of the world’s biggest businesses in running their business.
This is a potential bonanza for spying or sabotage, according to a cybersecurity research firm.
According to Resecurity Inc., a company that offers cybersecurity services and looks into hacker activity, the previously unreported data caches include emails and passwords for customer-support websites for two of the biggest data center operators in Asia: ST Telemedia Global Data Centres in Singapore and GDS Holdings in Shanghai.
There were about 2,000 affected GDS and STT GDC clients.
According to Resecurity, which claimed to have infiltrated the hacking group, at least five of them have had their accounts compromised, including the biggest foreign currency and debt trading platform in China and four others from India.
What the hackers did with the other logins, if anything, is unknown.
According to the security company and hundreds of pages of documents reviewed by Bloomberg, the information included credentials for a number of the largest corporations in the world, including Alibaba Group Holding, Amazon.com, Apple, BMW AG, Goldman Sachs Group, Huawei Technologies, Microsoft, and Walmart.
GDS sent a statement in response to inquiries over Resecurity’s findings, confirming that a customer assistance website was compromised in 2021.
How the hackers got their hands on the STT GDC data is unclear.
The business claimed there was no proof that the customer support portal had been compromised that year.
Both businesses stated that there was no risk to the client’s IT infrastructure or data from the fake credentials.
The customer-support website controls who is permitted to physically access the IT equipment housed in the data centers, according to Resecurity and executives at four significant US-based companies that were impacted, so they claimed that the stolen credentials represented an unusual and serious danger.
Several executives requested anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly about the incidents after learning about them from Bloomberg News and verifying the facts with their security teams.
The size of the data loss documented by Resecurity demonstrates the increased risk that businesses face as a result of their reliance on outside parties to store data and IT equipment and assist in connecting their networks to international markets.
Security experts claim that the problem is particularly serious in China, where businesses must collaborate with local data service providers.