Pearson Education Giant Suffers Massive Data Breach

Global education giant Pearson experienced a significant cyberattack resulting in the theft of a large amount of corporate data and customer information. Attackers exploited an exposed GitLab Personal Access Token (PAT) to breach Pearson's developer environment, gaining access to credentials for cloud platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, and Snowflake. This allowed them to steal terabytes of data, including customer information, financial data, and source code. While Pearson claims the stolen data was mostly "legacy data," they refuse to provide specifics, raising concerns. The incident highlights the critical need to secure .git/config files and avoid embedding credentials in remote URLs.