When we began building a Cyber Risk Research team at UpGuard, we knew there were unavoidable risks. We would be finding and publishing reports on sensitive, exposed data in order to stanch the flow of such private information onto the public internet. It seemed likely the entities involved would not always be pleased, particularly as the majority of the exposures we discovered would be attributable to human error and/or internal process failures.

Meltdown and Spectre are critical vulnerabilities affecting a large swathe of processors: “effectively every [Intel] processor since 1995 (except Intel Itanium and Intel Atom before 2013),” as meltdownattack.com puts it. ARM and AMD processors are susceptible to portions of Meltdown, though much less at risk than the affected Intel hardware. Exploiting Meltdown allows attackers to access data from other programs, effectively allowing them to steal whatever data they want.

GitHub is a popular online code repository used by over 26 million people across the world for personal and enterprise uses. GitHub offers a way for people to collaborate on a distributed code base with powerful versioning, merging, and branching features. GitHub has become a common way to outsource the logistics of managing a code base repository so that teams can focus on the coding itself.

Nearly all large enterprises use the cloud to host servers, services, or data. Cloud hosted storage, like Amazon's S3, provides operational advantages over traditional computing that allow resources to be automatically distributed across robust and geographically varied servers. However, the cloud is part of the internet, and without proper care, the line separating the two disappears completely in cloud leaks— a major problem when it comes to sensitive information.