Public Cloud Bucket Leak Exposes 2.5 M Student Loan Records

A leading student loan servicing platform inadvertently left an Amazon S3 bucket publicly accessible, allowing anyone on the internet to download files containing the personal and financial records of roughly 2.5 million borrowers. The exposed data included names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, loan balances, and payment histories, all of which were stored in clear‑text files without encryption or access controls.

The breach highlights a classic cloud‑misconfiguration risk that can affect any organization handling sensitive data. Defenders must enforce strict least‑privilege policies, regularly audit bucket permissions, and deploy automated tooling to detect public exposures. Failure to do so not only jeopardizes millions of individuals with identity‑theft and fraud threats but also brings regulatory penalties and severe reputational harm to the responsible entity.

Categories: Data Breaches, Cloud & SaaS Security, Data Protection & Privacy

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