parents and students to connect with private tutors, in-person and
online, in over 250 different subjects—has suffered a data breach
exposing “certain personal identification information” for its
customers.
The Hacker News received a copy of an email notification Wyzant
recently sent to its affected customers, which reveals an unknown
attacker was able to gain access to one of its databases on April
27, which the company identified a week after the security
incident.
The stolen personal identification information for affected
customers includes their first name, last name, email address, zip
code, and, for certain customers, their Facebook profile image as
well who log-in to the platform using Facebook.
Wyzant also explicitly made it clear that the stolen data did
not include any password, payment information, or record of its
customers’ activity on the Wyzant platform, and that no other than
the above-mentioned data was known to have been accessed.
Though it is still unclear how many customers were actually hit
by the security breach, or if both tutors and students are
affected, or what security hole the unknown attackers exploited to
get into the company’s network, the company did confirm that it has
now patched the underlying issue.
With more than 2 million registered users and over 76,000 active
tutors in its database, Wyzant is a decade-old popular tutoring
service that bring students and instructors together, online and
in-person.
In response to the security incident, Wyzant says it is
performing an extensive audit of its entire network and application
security infrastructure and will notify its customers of any
significant development.
“Wyzant has implemented additional security measures designed to
prevent a recurrence of such an attack and to protect the privacy
of our valued customers,” the company says.
“This includes reviewing our security processes and protocols. We
are also working closely with law enforcement to ensure the
incident is properly addressed.”
potential phishing attacks wherein attackers could use their
personal information to trick them into providing additional
personal information, such as credit card information or passwords.
The Hacker News has reached out to the company to know more
about the data breach incident and will update this article as soon
as we’ll hear back from it.
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