Crypto-wallet firm Ledger has revealed a major security breach of its e-commerce and marketing database, resulting in the compromise of one million customer email addresses and the personal details of thousands.
Aside from the email addresses, which could be used in follow-on phishing attacks spoofing the brand, the hacker made off with the personally identifiable information (PII) of 9500 customers, including first and last name, postal address, phone number and ordered products.
Ledger was at pains to point out that no financial information or passwords were taken and that the incident doesn’t affect customers’ hardware wallets or stored funds.
The firm said it notified the French data protection regulator CNIL on July 17 and enlisted the help of Orange Cyberdefense four days after that to assess the damage and enhance its internal security posture.
“On July 14, 2020, a researcher participating in our bounty program made us aware of a potential data breach on the Ledger website. We immediately fixed this breach after receiving the researcher’s report and underwent an internal investigation,” the notice read.
“A week after patching the breach, we discovered it had been further exploited on June 25, 2020, by an unauthorized third party who accessed our e-commerce and marketing database.”
The firm added that it was now taking steps towards meeting ISO 27001.
Chris DeRamus, VP of technology at Rapid7’s Cloud Security Practice, argued that despite Ledger’s assurances, the incident will impact customer confidence in the brand.
“It is crucial to ensure that all sensitive information – from email addresses to cryptocurrency funds – is secure and kept out of the hands of threat actors,” he added.
“To ensure that a company database is secured, businesses should have Identity Access Management (IAM) governance in place. They should follow the principle of least-privileged access when provisioning IAM permissions by providing checks to restrict identities from being able to access beyond their systems.”
