The largest energy supplier in New England Eversource suffered a data breach after a customer’s personal information got exposed in an unsecured cloud server.
Eversource is the largest and the latest energy delivery company which currently powers 4.3 million electric and natural gas customers throughout Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire.
Eversource issued a notification with BleepingComputer stating they have warned their customers about the unsecured cloud storage server that has exposed their names, address, phone number, social security number, and account number.
Eversource is offering a 1 year of free identity monitoring service through Cyberscout for those who are affected by the data breach.
Eversource customers started contacting Cyberscout to learn more about the data breach after receiving the notification about the breach. Ultimately the customers were sent a document that contained frequently asked questions related to the breach for the customers to have some knowledge about the data breach incident.
According to the FAQ, Eversource conducted a review of the security systems on 16th March and found a “Cloud data storage folder” that had some misconfiguration where anyone was able to access the content stored in it. As soon as they found out the issue, they secured it immediately and began an investigation of the data that was stored in the folder.
The folder contained unencrypted personal information of 11,000 Eversource eastern Massachusetts customers created in August 2019.
Till now, Eversource did not detect any incident of misuse of the data of any customer, still, BleepingComputer recommends that users sign up for the free identity theft monitoring that is offered to them by Eversource. They will be alerted if their identity is being used fraudulently.
Ransomware attacks have increased significantly in the past two years and it is becoming increasingly important for utilities to upgrade their security systems to prevent these types of attacks that m occur in the future.
