Financial services provider Geoff Gray Corporation notified the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office this week of a “potential security breach” that occurred sometime between June 9th – when one of their servers was working properly and accessible – and June 14, when they were notified that the server wasn’t accessible.
Their July 5th letter states that one server, which is collocated by 14Market, appeared to have been disabled by an outside entity sometime between those dates. 14Market’s investigation indicated that it appeared that someone had tried (unsuccessfully) to set up IRC on the server.
Unable to determine if root access had been obtained or if there had been any breach of data, the firm retained Infiloop Consulting to investigate. Infiloop “confirmed that there was a potential breach.”
I am going to take a wild guess that GGC does not follow this blog because their notification letter to those affected tells them nothing at all about the nature of the incident or what types of data may have been compromised:
We are contacting you about a potential problem involving identity theft. While we do not believe any of your information was compromised, we are taking additional steps to enhance the security on our server to further protect your personal information.
And that’s all the say by way of describing the incident.
The company is not offering those affected any free credit-monitoring services. But what really caught my eye – apart from wondering whether some #AntiSec individuals may have been behind the effort to set up IRC on the server and the absence of any detailed description of the breach – is that the firm does not even offer those affected a phone number they can call at GGC if they have questions or concerns.
There have been so many templates and guides for organizations as to how to respond to a breach that by now, this type of notification letter is really substandard.
The company had not yet mailed out notifications as of July 5th. If the letters haven’t gone out in the mail yet, I’d encourage them to provide a more informative and supportive notification letter. Their customers shouldn’t have to read my blog to find out what happened – they should hear it from them.