(Bloomberg) -- Companies are misusing Alphabet Inc.’s virus scanner and similar products, and are unwittingly leaking data such as factory blueprints to intellectual property online, Israeli cybersecurity company Otorio Ltd. said.
The firm said it discovered thousands of unprotected files from companies in the pharmaceutical, industrial, automotive and food industries as part of a project to research the malware logged by VirusTotal, which is owned by Alphabet cyber security subsidiary Chronicle. Otorio didn’t find any documents uploaded to VirusTotal that had been used in a cyber attack.
“From what we found, we could design a very constructive hack. We found files that gave us a blueprint of how to infiltrate the production floor,” said Otorio Chief Executive Officer Daniel Bren, a reserve brigadier general who established the Israeli army’s cyber defense unit. “The companies’ trademarked secrets are on those blueprints.”
VirusTotal makes scanned documents available to cybersecurity firms and researchers to help improve the detection of malware. Scanning incoming files for malicious attacks with online services is common practice, but some security teams are uploading files indiscriminately, without understanding the terms of use or the potential risk, Otorio said.
The Israeli firm, which specializes in cybersecurity for industrial control systems, contacted VirusTotal about its findings in July, and Otorio said the company agreed that there was a need to raise awareness about how the service works and how security applications should be configured. The idea, said Bren, was to make the indu ..
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