VirusTotal commented on the leak of 5600 accounts

Head of Product Management Department VirusTotal Emiliano Martinez commented on the accidental data breach of 5600 corporate VIP clients of his service. He explained that a 313 KB file containing customer data was accidentally uploaded to the public section of the platform. The cause was a human factor, not a cyberattack or a vulnerability in the VirusTotal system.

According to Martinez, the data leak only affected premium customers of the service. The file contained the names and corporate email addresses of these clients. The incident was identified and resolved within an hour, and access to the file was restricted to VirusTotal partners and cybersecurity analysts with a paid Premium account.

The company apologizes for the incident and assures that it is taking measures to prevent similar situations in the future. In particular, VirusTotal has revised its internal processes and introduced new technical controls.

Journalists who studied the data pointed out that the leak affected not only information security specialists from the United States, but also employees of government agencies in the Czech Republic, UAE, Great Britain, Saudi Arabia, Estonia, France, Colombia, Japan, Germany, Israel, Lithuania, Turkey, Poland, Qatar, Slovakia, Egypt. Some of them used personal mailboxes on Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo to register on the platform.