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I received an apology email from my Alma Mater. Here's an extract. The last para makes an explicit statement that Blackbaud paid the ransom. On Thursday, 16 Ju
by KineticLensman 6y ago
I received an apology email from my Alma Mater. Here's an extract. The last para makes an explicit statement that Blackbaud paid the ransom.
On Thursday, 16 July, we were made aware of a security incident involving one of our third-party service providers, Blackbaud.
Blackbaud is one of the world's largest providers of customer relationship management systems for the higher education and not-for-profit sectors.
It informed us that in May it had discovered and stopped a ransomware attack on its systems, although some data was compromised. A number of universities using its services have been affected, including the University of Leeds.
The company assures us that data compromised in the incident was comparatively low risk and did not contain any password, bank account or credit card information.
We are continuing to work closely with Blackbaud to determine exactly what personal data was compromised. We understand that other clients of Blackbaud have been affected in different ways, with varying types of data involved. In our case, it appears that names and email addresses for some members of our alumni and supporter community were affected. Information on the sums given as gifts or event payments through the alumni web portal, Leeds Alumni Online, may also have been affected, although not any bank account or credit card details. As we understand that you haven’t used our website to make any financial transactions, this aspect will not affect you.
Blackbaud paid a ransom to the cybercriminal and received assurances that the stolen data was destroyed and not used or sold on to third parties. Blackbaud says that – based on the nature of the incident, its research, and investigation by third parties (including law enforcement) – it has no reason to believe any data went beyond the cybercriminal, was or will be misused, or will be disseminated or otherwise made available publicly.
- heavenlyblue 6y ago> No reason to believe it went beyond the cyber criminal. They have a really corporate sense of humour.
- KineticLensman 6y agoIndeed. Needless to say this is my reason for finally getting off their mailing list.
- thinkingemote 6y agoIt's bizarre but these criminals need to establish trust generally. If victims believed that a ransom wouldn't do anything they would not pay them as much. I think there's a parallel with kidnapping in some countries, it's almost business like.
- toyg 6y agoYou can bet that if kidnappers could make an identical copy of the victim in order to profit from him further down the line, most of them would. I fully expect this data to surface in a year or so.
- heavenlyblue 6y agoCan you imagine having a Chief We-have-been-pwned Officer who is responsible for building relationships with criminals so that they would actually delete your data rather than resurface it years later when nobody remembers (not even you) you having lost it?
- heavenlyblue 6y agoThe funny thing in this is that the criminals are pseudonymous at best and you can clone pseudonyms as much as you like. Also have you never worked for a corporation? My first thought is that the management went for the first most obvious solution that is paying the money.
- stordoff 6y agoSelwyn College, Cambridge issued a similar statement: > We recently learned that Selwyn was one of a number of educational and voluntary sector organisations in Cambridge, the UK and across the world to have been affected by a data breach at the US company Blackbaud. [...] In order to protect customers’ data and mitigate potential identity theft, Blackbaud met the ransomware demand in relation to this file. Blackbaud has advised us that having paid the ransom it received assurances that this data had been destroyed and since then there has been no indication that this data remains in circulation. They also linked to Blackbaud's statement, which confirms they paid the ransom: > Because protecting our customers’ data is our top priority, we paid the cybercriminal’s demand with confirmation that the copy they removed had been destroyed. Incidentally, the notification was sent via Blackbaud, and appears to track that I clicked through to the statement (URL includes bblinkid/bbemailid/bbejrid parameters). https://www.selwynalumni.com/main-website-pages/blackbaud-data-breach https://www.selwynalumni.com/main-website-pages/blackbaud-da... https://www.blackbaud.co.uk/newsroom/news-archives/2020/07/16/learn-more-about-the-ransomware-attack-we-recently-stopped https://www.blackbaud.co.uk/newsroom/news-archives/2020/07/1...
- philjohn 6y agoReceived almost a verbatim email from the University of Birmingham as well. I wonder how much information they still have on me, seeing as I graduated 18 years ago ...
- heavenlyblue 6y agoTo be fair, how do you prove that you graduated if you lose your diploma otherwise?