20 February 2018
Security researchers have posted "friendly warnings" to users of Amazon's cloud data storage service whose private content has been made public, the BBC has learned.
The BBC found almost 50 warnings posted to the firm's servers. Many had more than one warning uploaded to them.
The messages urged owners to secure their information before it was stolen by malicious hackers.
There was a rash of data breaches involving Amazon Web Services in 2017.
Misconfigured settings by users were repeatedly blamed.
Although Amazon is best known for its online shopping service, its AWS division serves many of the world's biggest businesses as well as governments and other public bodies.
Varied alerts
The messages discovered on the US firm's data stores varied.
Some just told the owners that their settings exposed data and others were more explicit in their warnings about what could happen.
One said: "Please fix this before a bad guys finds it."
The BBC passed its list of sites that had received warning messages to Amazon as week ago, so it could contact the customers and suggest they review their settings.
What is cloud storage?
In essence, these machines act like the hard drive on your desktop computer and can hold almost any type of data or file.
Organisations use these cloud-based stores for all kinds of tasks. Some use them to hold images, documents and other files that populate their websites. Others use them as repositories for detailed data that is mined or analysed to help other bits of their business.
They are also popular because sometimes they can be set up using only a credit card - much more quickly than would be possible via a company's internal admin systems.
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