Will Vandevanter, of Help Net Security, made a rather disturbing discovery: thousands of Amazon S3 data "buckets" were improperly configured and left exposed to prying eyes. Vandevanter started his probe by generating URLs using the names of major companies and sites that use Amazon's cloud storage service. In the end he uncovered 12,328 of the so-called buckets -- 1,951 of which were visible to the public. Those folders were home to some 126 billion files that contain everything from personal data hosted by a social networking service, sales records, video game source code and e
