- Pearson has recently confirmed to have suffered a cyberattack
- The company claims hackers obtained “older data”
- No threat actors assumed the responsibility yet
Educational Services Giant Pearson has confirmed to suffer a cyber attack and lose customer data, but have played the importance of the violation, suggesting that the stolen data were outdated anyway.
Bleeping computer was tipped by someone using an exposed gitlab -personal access token to compromise Pearson’s development environment in January 2025.
The token was found in a public .git/config file, where attackers use this access to find even more login credentials that are hard code in the source code, which they then used to infiltrate the company’s network and steal company and customer information.
Chinese threat
Pearson later confirmed the news in a statement that was made to Bleeping computer:
“We recently discovered that an unauthorized actor had access to some of our systems,” the statement states.
“When we identified the activity, we took steps to stop it and investigate what happened and what data was affected by forensic experts. We also supported law enforcement investigation. We have taken steps to implement additional protective measures to our systems, including improving security monitoring and approval.”
Then the company suggested that the data may not be as valuable: “We are continuing to investigate, but at this point we believe that the actor downloaded largely older data. We will share additional information directly with customers and partners as needed.”
There was no employee information between the stolen files it was confirmed. Pearson did not want to say how many people were affected by the incident or what kind of information was exposed in this “older data”.
Unfortunately, it is nothing new and criminals by leaving sensitive information in git projects, and criminals by it. In a recent analysis published by Security Pros Greynoise, it was said that cyber criminals have increased their scan after vulnerable git configuration files as they hunted for vulnerable organizations in Singapore.
