ChildFund in New Zealand has issued a public notice about a data breach involving a telemarketing company, Pareto Phone Limited. ChildFund had contracted with Pareto in 2014 to conduct fundraising activity on its behalf.
ChildFund does not say when it may have stopped working Pareto, but Pareto suffered a cyberattack in April of this year that resulted in personal information of ChildFund NZ donors being accessed by an unknown party. ChildFund NZ is one of 70 charities impacted by the Pareto breach.
A statement in the public notice and FAQs raises questions:
We understand that Pareto Phone held records of client donors for active and non-active campaigns for fundraising purposes. We have requested that, after its investigation into this incident is finalised, Pareto Phone deletes all ChildFund NZ information.
It sounds like old data from ChildFund Donors was still retained by Pareto although it was no longer needed. Did ChildFund have a contract with Pareto that required them to delete data that was no longer needed for donor campaigns?
At any time since 2014, did ChildFund NZ check to see if Pareto was purging data that was no longer deleted? If so, when did ChildFund NZ last check on that?
How many people are being notified of this breach?
ChildFund NZ states it:
no longer uses Pareto Phone for telemarketing fundraising initiatives. Our current telemarketing partner, Cornucopia, has strict data protection policies and procedures in place, including procedures to ensure that personal information:
- is stored on an internal server accessed via intranet (not internet);
- is subject to appropriate access restrictions;
- is anonymized and destroyed 3 months after the final call completion
So did they have those same provisions in their contract with Pareto? What was in their contract and when did the contract end? Did the contract call for Pareto to return or securely destroy all data at the termination of the contract?
While this public notice focuses on Pareto’s breach, what had ChildFund NZ done since 2014 to ensure their donor data was properly secured and properly purged by Pareto?
DataBreaches sent an email inquiry to ChildFund NZ to ask some of these questions. No reply has been received by publication time.