I confess: some data leaks are not particularly interesting to me in terms of their sector or type of data leaked, but they become noteworthy because of the entity’s horrible, terrible, ridiculously bad incident response to attempted notification.
Today we give you Maropost Inc. a marketing automation platform whose 10,000+ clients include New York Post, Shopify, Fujifilm, Hard Rock Café, and Mother Jones.
CyberNews reports today that researchers found that Maropost was exposing a database containing close to 95 million individual customer records and email logs with more than 19 million unique email addresses.
Finding the leak was relatively easy. Getting Maropost to respond to responsible disclosure notifications? Not so much. They explain:
We went through multiple channels to get in touch with literally anyone at Maropost who could escalate this issue, and we failed on every single channel.
Here’s a quick recap of their determined efforts to protect data that Maropost continued to expose:
Attempt 1: email
Attempt 2: live chat
Attempt 3: Twitter
Attempt 4: LinkedIn
Attempt 5: email, part 2
Attempt 6: an actual phone call
Attempt 7: live chat, part 2
Attempt 8: email, part 3
Two months after they began their efforts to get the data locked down, they finally got a reply from Maropost CEO Ross Andrew Paquette. According to the firm’s statement, the email addresses in the database were randomized data the company uses for internal testing. Ah, the old “it’s just test data” explanation? Not so fast, Maropost because CyberNews reports that “our own tests show that not to be the case.”
I realize that in the midst of a pandemic, priorities get adjusted. But in my opinion, Maropost’s failure to respond to repeated notifications is pretty inexcusable. Maropost is Toronto-based, so they may get away with this, but I would hope the Ontario Privacy Commissioner would look into this one.
Read CyberNews’ full report here, as they detail what happened with each of the eight channels they tried to get Maropost to respond.
Update: MediaPost obtained a more detailed statement from Marapost that you can read here.