Suspicious Canon Outage Leads To Image.Canon Data Loss

Suspicious Canon Outage Leads To Image.Canon Data Loss

Canon’s image.canon cloud storage service has resumed operations after an almost six-day outage that led to data loss for stored images and videos.

Image.canon is a cloud storage service that allows Canon wi-fi connected cameras to upload and temporarily store videos and pictures.

As part of this service, Canon users also get 10GB of permanent storage that can be used to back up their most important videos and images.

On July 30th, 2020, the image.canon service suddenly stopped working, and visitors were left with a message stating “Sorry, service not available.”

On August 3rd, a day after BleepingComputer emailed Canon and received no response, the Canon website page was updated with further information stating that the problem was with the 10GB long term storage feature.

They further noted that photos and video files had been lost due to the outage.

Thank you for using image.canon.

On the 30th of July, we identified an issue within the 10GB long term storage on image.canon. Some of the original photo and video data files have been lost. We have confirmed that the still image thumbnails of the affected files have not been affected.

In order to conduct further review, we have temporarily suspended both the mobile app and web browser service of image.canon.

Information regarding the resumption of service and contact information for customer support will be made available soon.

There has been no leak of image data.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

Today, August 4th, Canon resumed the image.canon service with an updated message containing a strange addition. This new message states, “there was no leak of image data.”

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If you work at Canon or know someone working there with first-hand information on this incident, you can confidentially contact us on Signal at +16469613731.

Maybe it’s because I write so much about hacks and ransomware attacks, but I feel that there is something not quite right about this updated information.

If it was a storage issue, why shut down the service for almost a week?

I find it even more suspicious as Canon decided to include the statement that “there was no leak of image data.”

If this was not a cyberattack, but rather a storage issue, why did the updated message state that data was not leaked?

For data to be leaked, the systems would have had to be breached and stored data stolen.

At this point, BleepingComputer has not been able to dig up any information regarding whether this was an attack or simply a hardware failure.

BleepingComputer has also reached out to Canon multiple times during the outage for more details but has not yet received a response.

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