Dialog Claims It Was Hacked. A Misconfigured Website Left Its Members Exposed

Source Domain: www.wired.com

Dialog, the invite-only group cofounded by Peter Thiel, notified members and past event participants last week that a database containing their personal information had been breached, supposedly by a criminal hacker. But a WIRED analysis found that the files were readable to anyone who visited a landing page for the group’s app—what cybersecurity experts describe as a misconfiguration that effectively made the data publicly accessible.

The notification to people affected by the data exposure, emailed by Dialog managing director Juliette Levine and provided to WIRED, said that forensic investigators found that the names of 113 past participants in Dialog events had been exposed and, separately, “some” people registered for this summer’s Dialog retreat had their information accessed. Levine said the organization had temporarily closed many of its systems in response.

The exposure, Levine alleged, “was a hack executed by a well-known criminal who is wanted in the United States,” adding that the group had acted “out of caution” to protect “the safety, privacy, and reputation of every Dialoger past and present.”

Multiple reviews of the site’s publicly accessible architecture, though, point to a misconfiguration, not a break-in.

WIRED first reported on the Dialog records last week. They include the list of 113 names that Dialog confirmed to be past participants in its breach disclosure—among them a sitting NATO commander, two US senators, and the US treasury secretary—as well as a separate, longer list of people registered for an August retreat outside Dublin, Ireland. WIRED also reported on records that revealed how the group privately scores attendees, weighing their wealth and prominence in decisions about admission, seating, and pricing.

A Dialog site, set up to distribute a phone app for the August gathering, let any visitor sign up using any email address. It did not request a password. After submitting an email, the visitor was taken to a…

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