We believe every data breach is another opportunity for organizations to learn more about their security.

How are you currently treating your data?
What processes do you have in place to prevent a breach?

While we could strive to do everything perfectly, even the most secure organizations undergo data breaches – like the infamous Sisense breach.

We’re taking a closer look at the Sisense breach, an AI-powered analytics tool, and what happened to their data after it was stolen. We believe by understanding the details of the incident and the steps taken by Sisense in response, we can gain valuable insights into how to better protect and recover our own data and systems from similar threats.

Sisense Data Breach: What is Sisense?

Sisense is a business intelligence and analytics platform that enables organizations to turn complex data into actionable insights.

One of the notable features of the Sisense platform is its ability to handle large volumes of data from multiple sources, allowing users to create interactive dashboards and reports with ease.

The platform’s user-friendly interface and powerful visualization capabilities have made it a popular choice among data-driven organizations.

This makes it a helpful tool for users, but unfortunately, an even more abundant space for hackers to steal information from Sisense.

The Sisense Breach

Now, let’s turn our attention to the Sisense breach itself. What exactly happened, and how did Sisense respond?

Incident Discovery

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) discovered the Sisense breach 2024 after receiving alerts about the breach, revealing that attackers gained access to Sisense’s self-managed GitLab repository.

This unauthorized access led to the exfiltration of sensitive customer data, including millions of access tokens and SSL certificates.

Nature of the Breach

In the Sisense security breach, attackers gained access to the company’s self-managed GitLab repository, which led to the exfiltration of sensitive customer data, including millions of access tokens and SSL certificates, potentially risking data in third-party services, too.

Scope of the Breach

The scope of the data breach at Sisense involved attackers gaining access to their self-managed GitLab repository, leading to the exfiltration of sensitive customer data, including millions of access tokens, email passwords, and SSL certificates.

Response and Mitigation

When Sisense found out about the data breach, they immediately responded by advising their customers to reset a wide range of credentials and secrets. This included resetting passwords, rotating tokens, updating certificates, logging out all users, and making changes to database connections, among other security measures.

Specific recommendations to their customers included:

• Rotating credentials used within the Sisense application
• Resetting passwords for all users
• Logging out all users to invalidate current sessions
• Updating x.509 certificates for SSO SAML identity providers
• Rotating client secrets for OpenID utilization
• Resetting credentials in databases used within Sisense
• Changing usernames and passwords in database connection strings
• Rotating credentials in every Git project
• Updating B2D connections, rotating keys associated with Infusion Apps
• Rotating all web access tokens
• Resetting secrets present in custom code notebooks

Clearly, there’s a lot going on here! But when it comes to data and compliance, it’s always better to err on the side of caution, especially when organizations are still figuring out the crux of the issue (which, by the way, the public still doesn’t know).

Long-term Strategy

This breach taught Sisense and many organizations something valuable — the power of secrets sprawl. When you have important information left embedded in plaintext in source code, they can very quickly become information leaks that affect the entire organization and their customers.

Sisense Breach Update: What We Can Learn From the Sisense Security Breach

Importance of Proactive Monitoring

One of the most crucial lessons from the Sisense breach is the importance of proactive monitoring.

By continuously monitoring their systems and networks for suspicious activity, organizations can detect potential breaches early on and take swift action to mitigate their impact.

Using Qohash’s data monitoring tool, Qostodian, can put data monitoring in-place before anything risky happens. This can include:

• Real-time visibility into sensitive data contained in files across the riskiest data sources.
• The ability to quarantine and eliminate files through the platform to reduce the attack surface
• Complete risk coverage by scanning unstructured data at rest for a detailed inventory by department and more

Implementing these tools and regularly reviewing the data they provide can help organizations stay one step ahead of potential threats.

How to Secure Configuration Management

Misconfigurations and outdated settings can create vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit to gain unauthorized access to systems and data like in the Sisense breach.

To secure your configuration management, it’s essential to conduct regular audits and updates.  This includes reviewing and updating security settings, patching known vulnerabilities, and ensuring that only authorized personnel have access to configuration settings.

Qostodian Recon helps track sensitive data to reduce the risk of breaches caused by misconfigurations.

Effective Incident Response

Despite our best efforts, breaches can still occur.

That’s why having an effective incident response plan is crucial. A well-defined plan outlines the steps to be taken in the event of a breach, including roles and responsibilities, communication protocols, and recovery procedures.

With a partner like Qohash, you can implement an effective incident response plan throughout your organization, from assembling your incident response team to implementing regular testing.

Data Encryption and Access Controls

Data encryption is a powerful tool for protecting sensitive information from unauthorized access. By encrypting data both at rest and in transit, organizations can ensure that even if a breach occurs, the data remains unreadable to attackers.

As far as access controls are concerned, your org should implement prices like:

• Role-based access
• Multi-factor authentication

User Awareness and Training

While technical controls are important, it’s also crucial to address the human element of cybersecurity. User awareness and training programs can help employees understand the risks and best practices for protecting data.

Effective training programs cover topics such as identifying and reporting phishing attempts, creating strong passwords, and handling sensitive data securely. Regular refresher training and phishing simulations can help keep security top of mind and reinforce best practices.

Transparency and Communication

In the event of a breach like the data breach Sisense, transparency and communication are key. Organizations should have a clear plan for notifying affected parties, including customers, regulatory authorities, and the public, in a timely and transparent manner.

There was likely a Sisense data breach update sent out to their team as the investigation and mitigation continued, so all the departments were in the know and aware of what they needed to do to keep their information safe.

Maintaining open lines of communication and providing regular updates can help mitigate the reputational damage caused by a breach and demonstrate the organization’s commitment to addressing the issue. It’s important to be honest about what happened, what steps are being taken to address it, and what affected individuals can do to protect themselves.

Monitor and Secure Your Data with Qohash!

Qohash offers cutting-edge data security solutions designed to help you monitor and secure your data with confidence.

Our platform provides real-time data discovery, classification, and monitoring, enabling you to gain visibility into your data assets and detect potential risks before they become breaches. With advanced encryption and access controls, Qohash ensures that your data remains secure and accessible only to authorized users.

Don’t wait until it’s too late – schedule a demo today and take proactive steps to protect your data!