Newsberry

Security Breach – Issues this weekend

Posted in Problems on Apr 10, 2010 by Natalie Nagele

As we mentioned yesterday, we identified that someone gained unauthorized access to a single account. While initially this seemed to be an isolated issue, we continued to investigate throughout the day and night and have determined that we were victim to an organized attack on our servers.

At this time, it looks like only 2 accounts were affected (those customers have been notified directly), and that the goal of the organization was to use our mail servers to send Spam email. Since we have several levels of protection in place, they were not able to send out a large number of emails and therefore affect delivery of your campaigns.

Since the attack occurred on our servers, we are in the process of strengthening our servers. This has caused unannounced server restarts and downtime this weekend. We are still actively investigating the extent of the breach, and will provide updates on the blog as they become available. For now, our priority is to secure everything today to ensure your data safety.

We want to sincerely apologize for the incident. We know you have put your trust in us to keep your data safe, and please know we do not take this lightly and are doing everything we can to ensure this first time incident is also the last. Unfortunately, these attacks have become common against Email Service Providers, many occurring within the last few months to some other well known services.

Please note, your credit card information is safe. We do not store it ourselves so it is not possible for anyone to acquire it. As for your subscriber list, we believe that they did not set out to take it. If you, or your subscribers, feel that they are receiving unwanted emails all of a sudden, please let us know right away.

We thank you for your continued support through this difficult time. We will continue to be honest and transparent with you. If you have any questions or concerns, please email us. We will post updates here and on Twitter. Once we have more information, we will email all account owners directly.

Update: Our servers are undergoing a serious security audit by both internal and external experts. We are sure we closed the breach and fixed everything, but we want a second opinion!