Cybersecurity services company Imperva was hacked & its customers’ data breached

Despite not being the oldest company in the field of cybersecurity, Imperva has established itself as one of the leaders in this market, offering solutions and advice to help other companies protect the security of their information; however, this does not make it immune to cyberattacks. Web application security experts reported a data breach in the company that has compromised a considerable amount of Imperva customers’ data.

Established in California, USA, Imperva is a cybersecurity software and services company that provides enterprise data protection and web application security for multiple companies.

To be more specific, the data breach affects users of Cloud WAF, the company’s cloud application firewall solution. This is a product specialized in the mitigation of denial of service (DoS) attacks and also has other security protection features of web application security.

The incident was detected about a week ago after the company received some reports on data exposure from some customers of this security tool, web application security experts mentioned.

In a statement, company CEO Chris Hylen mentioned that the data exposed due to this incident include email addresses of all users of the tool who started using it from September 2017, API keys, SSL certificates, among other data.

“After detecting the incident, the implementation of our security breach response protocol began, and an internal investigation will be conducted and we will exhaust all available resources to retrieve the compromised information”, mentions the statement. “International data protection regulators have already been informed,” Hylen adds.

The company’s web application security experts still do not determine what methods threat actors used to access and leak this information, as it is unclear whether any vulnerabilities in their web servers were exploited or if Imperva staff committed some oversight, miss configuring the security of some database on the Internet.

The company continues to investigate the data breach, and they also ensure that customers potentially affected by the incident are being notified. Other security measures will be announced shortly. “We deeply regret the inconvenience this incident has caused; we will continue to share updates in the coming days in line with the progress of our research. We are confident that this bad experience will help us improve our security practices and prevent similar incidents in the future,” the statement concludes.

As the company’s research concludes, web application security specialists from the International Institute of Cyber Security (IICS) recommend that users of the Cloud WAF tool reset their passwords to access their Imperva accounts, in addition to implementing other security layers, such as the use of multi-factor authentication. Generating and uploading new SSL certificates and resetting their API keys are also highly recommended measures.