In a detailed blog post, UpGuard said the commits history of the projects showed that they had been under development for at least two years and were being actively updated at the time they were discovered.

Once Onehalf was informed about the data lying open to all, it secured the data and on 22 August UpGuard confirmed that the repositories were no longer accessible by the public.

The unsecured repositories were found on 9 August. An UpGuard analyst found a repository named "HRIS" which was for "Onehalf Human Resources Information System. Centralised database for all systems."

The most important information appeared to be a centralised database of information about roughly 250 of Onehalf employees - name, date of birth, phone number, address, personal and work email addresses, and blood type were all present.

Another project in the repositories included a list of 28 companies operating in Australia that appeared to be Onehalf clients.

"For many of these companies, their banking BSB and account numbers were also listed in plain text. While BSB numbers are public, account numbers are not, and unauthorised possession of these numbers make it easier to commit a range of financial crimes," UpGuard said.

"In some cases the contact information for the individuals at those accounts was also included, further heightening the potential for fraud.

"Most of the companies involved in the exposure operate in transport and logistics, but there were also banking, insurance, and manufacturing businesses in Onehalf's client list."

UpGuard commented that the Onehalf data exposure was relatively small compared to some of its other finds.

iTWire has contacted Onehalf for comment.

In the past, UpGuard has found data from Web host GoDaddy lying open on the Web, data from more than 100 manufacturing companies exposed on a publicly accessible server belonging to Level One Robotics, an insurance firm exposed in an unsecured NAS device. It has also found misconfigured Amazon Web Services S3 buckets leaking data from Paris-based brand marketing company Octoly, California data analytics firm Alteryx, credit repair service National Credit Federation, the NSA, the Pentagon, global corporate consulting and management firm Accenture, publisher Dow Jones, a Chicago voter database, a North Carolina security firm, a contractor for the US National Republican Committee, and data relating to a number of subsidiaries of Blue Chair, a holding company in Kansas City.

But late in February, UpGuard had to rework a report on what it claimed was a cloud-based data storage repository, that was used by business analytics software provider Birst and left unsecured.

It said as a result, data about financial services firm Capital One had been exposed.

But Capital One contested these claims, as did Birst. UpGuard then took down its original post, while it discussed the matter with Capital One. An updated version of its post was issued in March.