A data breach can be an embarrassing admission for a company, but when it comes to a leak of government controlled data, particularly in regards to the sort of sensitive information held by national security agencies and the military, the stakes can become a lot higher. It appears that the US Department of Defence has had to make just such an admission, as it notified an estimated 20,600 individuals that some of their email messages and potentially personal information contained within had been exposed to the internet at large.
The breach occurred last year between February 3 and February 20, and has been attributed to an unsecured US government cloud email server hosted on Microsoft's cloud for government customers (via TechCrunch). The server was believed to be accessible during this period without password access, meaning anyone with the public IP address could view the emails contained within using nothing but a web browser.
