CafePress is being served with a class-action lawsuit in the United States after allegedly failing to update its security software and informing customers of a data breach months after learning of the incident.
The online gift shop retailer was criticized earlier this year for its weak cybersecurity and incident response after discovering 23 million customers had their personal information compromised in a data breach thought to have happened in February 2019.
Sites like weleakinfo.com and haveibeenpwnd.com began warning consumers of the breach back in July 2019, but the incident had not been officially reported by CafePress to customers until last week.
Email addresses, names, physical addresses, phone numbers, passwords stored as SHA-1 hashes, the last four digits of credit card numbers, credit card expiration dates, and some Social Security and tax identification numbers are among the information exposed in this data breach.
Consumer-rights kaw firm FeganScott is behind the suit, alleging that CafePress did not employ security best practices when informing customers of the security breach. The complaint details that CafePress' first notifications appeared on its website on September 5, but the company did not directly notify customers until October 2, 2019.
It's also alleged that CafePress failed to offer protection to its customers by failing to update its security software which is known to be extremely flawed. Relying on Security Hash Algorithm 1 (SHA-1) is essentially useless in protecting data and that's been widely known about for well over a decade.
The suit filed on Monday, October 7 hopes to represent all US consumers who were impacted by the data breach, arguing that CafePress customers have been forced to spend time and money monitoring their credit, mitigating the risks of identity theft, addressing fraudulent activity on their accounts, and reviewing their credit reports as a result of the retailers concealing the breach for almost eight months.
Organizations collecting and storing personal data must have the appropriate security controls in place to safeguard consumer data. A great place would be by implementing the CIS Controls, twenty security controls developed by the Center for Internet Security that have been proven to protect businesses from today's most pervasive and dangerous cyber attacks. Learn more about the CIS Controls
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