Online printing site Doxzoo exposed thousands of customer files
Doxzoo proudly says on its website that your "documents are in safe hands." But for some time, that wasn't true.
The U.K. printing company left its customer files on a cloud storage bucket, hosted on Amazon Web Services, without a password. Anyone who knew the easy-to-guess bucket name could access the massive trove of customer files. By the time that the company secured the bucket, it contained more than 250,000 customer-uploaded files.
When reached by email, Paul Bennett, one of the company's directors, confirmed the exposure.
"The data we store [with Amazon] is solely the files we use for printing their documents and we have a clear privacy policy on our website to cover how this data is held," said Bennett.
"We frequently review processes and technical architectures to ensure we adhere to current best practices. We are committed to providing the best possible service to our customers and take the security of their personal data very seriously," he added. "We have already sought guidance from the ICO on our data security and the precautions we take."
But a spokesperson for the U.K.'s Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) said it has not received a notification of a security lapse from Doxzoo.
"People have the right to expect that organization's will handle their personal information securely and responsibly," the ICO spokesperson said. "Where that doesn't happen, people can come to the ICO and we will look into the details. When a data incident occurs, we would expect an organization to consider whether it is appropriate to contact the people affected, and to consider whether there are steps that can be taken to protect them from any potential adverse effects."
Companies that fall foul of European data protection rules can be fined up to 4% of their annual turnover.
At the time of writing, Doxzoo has made no mention on either its blog or its social platforms about the security lapse.
Doxzoo finds itself in similar company to Rallyhood, a Sprint contractor, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, FormGet, Mixcloud, and Samsung, all of which have in the past year left sensitive data online by mistake.