Amazon S3, one of the leading cloud storage solutions, is used by companies all over the world to power their IT operations. Over four years, UpGuard has detected thousands of S3-related data breaches caused by the incorrect configuration of S3 security settings. Jeff Barr, Chief Evangelist for Amazon Web Services recently announced public access settings for S3 buckets, a new feature designed to help AWS customers stop the epidemic of data breaches caused by incorrect S3 security settings.

Your primary systems aren’t the only source of damaging exposed credentials. Third-party applications employed by your organization also have privileged logins that must be protected. Cloud platforms, software as a service (SaaS), and local third party applications such as ERP systems often have administrative logins with full control.

UpGuard’s researchers regularly uncover and report on corporate data breaches. We often find that the breach is not directly caused by the company, but by one of their third-party vendors. This series of posts is about a less-understood aspect of vendor risk, data breaches by third-party vendors. We will run you through many types of data breaches, how they relate to your third-party vendors, and ultimately what you can do to prevent them from hurting your business.