AWS Hopes Macie Machine Learning Tool Will Stem Cloud Data Loss

Amazon has unveiled a machine learning-based tool aimed at securing sensitive data held in the cloud, after a number of high-profile data leaks involving customers of Amazon Web Services (AWS). The tool, called Macie, was announced at the AWS New York Summit event along with an automated extract, transform and load (ETL) service and a unified repository of AWS' data migration tools. The announcement follows several data breaches in which major companies were found to have stored sensitive data on AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) in a way that left it publicly accessible. Last month it was disclosed that Verizon had exposed data on about 6 million customers in this way, and similar incidents have affected voter information held by the Republican National Committee (RNC) and customer data exposed by wrestling entertainment company WWE. The RNC breach, disclosed in June, affected more than 198 million people, or about 61 percent of the US population, and was the country's largest-ever voter data exposure.