Gearbest issues response to data breach

Sorry

Following on from yesterday's story about eCommerce site Gearbest leaking customer data the company has issued an official response to ethical hacker Noam Rotem’s report.

It says that its own servers are secure but that, "external tools we use to temporarily store data" may have been accessed by others leading to security having been compromised.

The statement goes on to say:

The external tools we use are intended to improve efficiency and prevent data overload and the data will only be stored in such tools for less than three calendar days before it is automatically destroyed. Considering possible data security breaches, we protected those tools with powerful firewalls to avoid any such data being compromised by malicious scanning from others. However, our investigation reveals that on March 1st, 2019, such firewalls were mistakenly taken down by one of our security team members for reasons still being under investigation. Such unprotected status has directly exposed those tools for scanning and accessing without further authentication.

It says the leak will only have affected customers who registered or placed orders between March 1st and March 15th and that the total number of records exposed is around 280,000. The breach was, it is claimed, fixed within two hours of discovery and Gearbest says it will strengthen its security management to avoid similar issues in the future.

The statement concludes:

We truthfully apologize for what happened. In addition to what we have done mentioned above, we will be urgently carrying out measures to inactivate the passwords of those newly registered customers for avoidance any illegal login to their accounts and will also send email to all affected customers for updating the situation.

We take the security of our customers very seriously and will continue to do everything we can to create a safe and trusted shopping environment for our dear customers.

The full statement is available on the company's Facebook page.

Photo credit: Pavel Ignatov / Shutterstock

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