On January 31, lawyers for the University of Connecticut Cooperative Corporation notified the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office of a breach mentioned previously on this blog. Their letter revealed some previously unreported details, including the fact that the HuskyDirect.com web site was hosted and managed by Fuss & O’Neill Technologies LLC in Connecticut, a firm that does business as Fandotech.
According to the Co-ops lawyers, the breach was first discovered by customers who reported it to the Co-op. On December 28, the Co-op contacted Fandotech and asked them to investigate. Fandotech investigated but informed the Co-op that it found no evidence of a breach.
The Co-op called a few more times over the next days, each time asking Fandotech to investigate again.
On January 5, Fandotech reportedly found evidence that a breach had occurred on December 26 – two days before the Co-op started calling them to investigate a possible breach. It appears that whoever accessed the database started using the data immediately as by December 28, people were already reporting card fraud to the Co-op.
Significantly, the breach involved an unauthorized person accessing the database by using a Fandotech administrative password.
“Fandotech has sole access, authority, and control over that administrative password,” Aaron Bayer of Wiggin and Dana wrote to the New Hampshire Attorney General.
The database contained information on 18,059 people, 286 of whom were New Hampshire residents. Information in the database included customers’ names, addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, credit card numbers, card expiration dates, and card security codes. At the time of the breach, the Co-op
“understood from Fandotech that it employed a firewall, antivirus software, encryption, and a secure, administrative password to safeguard this data, and believed that Fandotech was PCI compliant.”
Under the PCI standards, however, the 3- or 4-digit card security codes may not be stored – even if encrypted.
The HuskyDirect.com web site, which was taken down the first week in January, is still not online.
In their correspondence of January 31, the Co-op’s attorneys describe the steps the Co-op has taken and note that despite the commercial cost in terms of lost revenues, the Co-op had not returned the site to operation. Their detailed response to the discovery of the breach included retaining Trustwave to perform an audit to determine the cause and a cure for the problem. Lawyers for the Co-op say that it does not intend to re-open the old HuskyDirect.com web site, but plans to open a new web site for UConn merchandise after it is assured that the web site will be in a secure environment.