Cisco’s Meraki Admits Losing Customer Data After Misconfiguration

Matthew Broersma,

An ‘erroneous policy’ put into place on Friday caused user-uploaded data to be erased from Meraki cloud-based communications systems and security cameras

Cisco said over the weekend that its Meraki subsidiary lost some customer data following a configuration error.

Meraki provides cloud-based tools including wireless networking, switching, security, enterprise mobility management (EMM), communications and security cameras, and the incident is the latest to raise concerns over the dangers of hosting infrastructure in the cloud.

Customer data missing

Meraki said a configuration change applied on Friday caused “certain data” uploaded by customers to be deleted.

Network configuration information isn’t affected, with only some data uploaded before 11:20 a.m. PT on Friday was deleted.

Cisco Live Meraki] (1)

“The issue has since been remediated and is no longer occurring,” Meraki said in a status update. “In the majority of cases, this issue will not impact network operations, but will be an inconvenience as some of your data may have been lost.”

Remote infrastructure

The deleted information includes custom splash themes and floor plans on user dashboards, contact images and custom enterprise apps in the Systems Manager EMM product, and hold music and voicemail greetings for telephone systems.

Meraki said it’s planning to issue an update today giving more information on the tools it’s developing to help customers restore their data.

The company didn’t indicate how many customers were affected, but says more than 140,000 customers use its services, with more than 2 million network devices connected.

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Cloud-based outages and data breaches are becoming more common as organisations increasingly come to rely on third-party infrastructure.

Recent incidents include a four-hour outage involving Amazon’s S3 web services platform, in March, which Amazon determined was caused by an engineering error.

The outage caused problems for a number of high-profile websites that depend on S3, including those of Adobe, Medium, Slack, Splitwise, Trello and the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

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