The problem isn’t that these people are incompetent at network security (they are), the problem is that these people had your data to begin with. Data security is impossible because there is a massive shadow market for your entire life history and no amount of privacy setting theater will make up for the fact that your personal data is currently the target of an insatiable feeding frenzy.

Perhaps someone was paid to open the Elasticsearch to the entire internet so that the buyer could grab the data.

> I do operations. I can tell you exactly how not to make rookie mistakes like this

But you guys are expensive and management can't tell what you do, so we invented devops to make the developers do it. It worked perfectly until it didn't.

Seriously though, as a dev with script kiddie levels of pen-testing skills it's amazing the amount of potential exploits out there. Even where I work with sensitive data it's assumed that the only attack vector is external.

> they don't want to pay for good talent in security

To be fair, I'm not sure they made the wrong choice.

The problem is how they get those data and not how securely they are kept.