UPDATE: Nitro has provided TechRadar Pro with a statement, included below. Sam Chandler, Nitro Founder and CEO, added, "Several media articles published in the past 24 hours contain a number of factual inaccuracies regarding this incident. The relevant database does not contain copies of user or customer documents. Documents are stored in a separate database in a different location. There is currently no established evidence that this separate database has been compromised. We are providing updates on the incident on our security page.”
The Australian company behind one of the best PDF editors, Nitro PDF has suffered a data breach that may have impacted several other well-known organizations.
As reported by BleepingComputer, Nitro PDF is used by over 10 thousand business customers, including the likes of Google, Apple, Microsoft, Case and Citibank, and 1.8m licensed users. However, the company also offers a cloud service that can be used by customers to share documents with coworkers as well as with employees at other organizations.
In an advisory published on the investor relations section of its site, Nitro Software informed its customers that it had suffered a “low impact security incident” though no sensitive financial data was impacted, saying:
- We've put together a list of the best antivirus software around
- Secure your network with the best endpoint protection software
- Also check out our roundup of the best ransomware protection
“Nitro's investigation into the incident remains ongoing. There is no evidence currently that any sensitive or financial data relating to customers has been impacted or that any information has been misused. Nitro has elevated its monitoring and security protocols and has not identified any further malicious activity connected to the incident.”
Nitro Software data breach
Although Nitro Software claims that no sensitive financial data was lost as a result of the breach, the cybersecurity firm Cyble has revealed to BleepingComputer that the company's user and document databases as well as 1TB of documents allegedly stolen from the company are being sold online in a private auction starting at $80,000.
According to Cyble, the user credential database table contains 70m user records which contain the email addresses, full names, bcrypt hashed passwords, titles, company names, IP addresses and other system data from Nitro Software's customers.
For instance, the database reportedly contains 17,137 documents from Amazon, 6,405 from Apple, 137,285 from Citi, 32,153 from Google and 2,390 from Microsoft. There is also a great deal of information related to financial reports, M&A activities, NDAs and product releases included in the database.
"Nitro continues to investigate an isolated security incident involving limited access to a Nitro database by an unauthorised third party," Nitro told TechRadar Pro in a statement.
"The incident database does not contain any user or customer documents, which are hosted in a separate database in a different location."
"The incident database is primarily used for service logging purposes related to Nitro’s popular free online document conversion services."
"Usage of Nitro’s free document conversion services does not require users to create an account or become a Nitro customer. Users are required to provide an email address – converted files are delivered to the email address provided – and common email domains are frequently entered and will show up in these logs."
"For clarity, the email domains in these logs do not constitute Nitro ‘customers’ or ‘accounts’, and the logs do not contain any documents."
"There is currently no established evidence that any sensitive or financial data relating to customers has been compromised. There is no impact to Nitro Pro or Nitro Analytics."
"Nitro’s environment was fully secured immediately after the incident was identified. While the incident database does not contain sensitive or financial information, and passwords are highly encrypted, we are communicating with customers and have implemented a password reset as a precautionary measure."
- We've tested out the best free PDF readers
Via BleepingComputer
