The Cost of Data Blindness

In July 2025, two very different breaches exposed the same systemic issue.

The first: a zero-day vulnerability in Microsoft SharePoint (CVE-2025-53770), confirmed by CISA as actively exploited in the wild. This unauthenticated flaw allowed attackers to run arbitrary code and access any file on on-prem servers – no login required. Researchers tied it to the “ToolShell” campaign, which uses forged payloads for stealthy lateral movement. While Microsoft issued interim mitigations, many organizations had already been quietly compromised.

The second: the Tea app, a wildly popular women-only platform with over 4 million users, leaked more than 70,000 private images, including selfies with passports and driver’s licenses. The cause? An open Firebase Storage bucket with no authentication. The images (some dating back years) were freely downloadable until a 4chan post revealed the issue, forcing the company into reactive containment.

These weren’t the result of ransomware or phishing. They were breaches born from blind spots – invisible until made public.

Modern security architectures often assume that sensitive data is protected by access controls and monitored by conventional tools. But those assumptions break down in cloud-centric, SaaS-driven environments, where data lives in increasingly fragmented and ephemeral forms.

Think of where your sensitive data is right now. Some of it lives in structured databases, but much of it floats through object stores, collaboration platforms, unmanaged third-party services, ephemeral chat logs, and AI-generated documents. It’s duplicated, embedded, exported, cached, all outside the scope of traditional visibility tools. And in these chaotic flows, sensitive content becomes invisible simply because no one’s watching in the right place, at the right time, with the right context.

Legacy DLP solutions, static tagging methods, and point-in-time audits simply can’t keep up with the dynamic, distributed nature of modern data environments. And when these brittle systems fail to recognize exposure, they fail silently.

Perhaps the most dangerous thing about visibility gaps is that they don’t announce themselves. There are no obvious alarms. No flashing red flags. Just unmonitored data slipping into the wrong hands, often discovered only when a user stumbles upon it, a researcher sounds the alarm, or a reporter calls.

And the consequences are just as damaging as a breach with a known threat actor. Regulatory exposure under GDPR or HIPAA. User distrust. Public outcry. Resource strain on legal, security, and communications teams. In the case of the Tea app, tens of thousands of women now face the possibility of permanent public exposure all because a bucket was left open.

Whether the trigger is an attacker exploiting a zero-day, or an internal oversight in a cloud configuration, the reputational and legal fallout doesn’t distinguish the cause. It only measures impact.

Most organizations don’t realize they’ve lost sight of their data until something goes wrong. But there are early signals that visibility is slipping:

Data inventories built on static scans or manual tagging – unable to reflect real-time reality and sprawl.

Security tooling that can’t parse or classify unstructured formats like images, chat logs, or AI-generated files.
Difficulty linking access to business context who accessed a file, why, and whether it was appropriate.

Repeated incident delays where the security team scrambles to understand what data was involved and who was affected.

These aren’t just operational annoyances. They’re signs of structural weakness in the data visibility layer that underpins the entire security program.

Solving data blindness isn’t about layering more tools or adding another compliance audit. It’s about reshaping the way visibility works, making it continuous, contextual, and deeply integrated into both the identity layer and operational workflows.

The most resilient organizations are the ones that can tell – in real time what kind of data they have, who has access to it, how that access aligns with business purpose, and how often that data changes hands. They aren’t trying to scan everything equally. Instead, they prioritize high-impact, high-sensitivity data, track it continuously across platforms, and use rich metadata to surface risk before it becomes exposed.

This shift demands that visibility isn’t treated as a one-off task, but as foundational capability. It should inform breach prevention, compliance reporting, identity governance, and even how security teams prioritize effort.

The Tea app exposure, the SharePoint zero-day, the recent Qantas logic flaw, these incidents differ in scope and cause, but share one truth: they only became crises because no one saw the data slipping out until it was too late.

In 2025, your adversaries aren’t always nation-states or cybercriminals. Sometimes, your biggest risk is a bucket left open. A permission misconfigured. A system behaving as designed, but not as expected.

Because in a world where breaches don’t always begin with intrusions, the real threat is what you don’t see.

Author of the article:

David Stuart, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Sentra.