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Veritas email faux-pas adds insult to injury for exam candidates

Data breach, then BCC, what next? Will the rubble burn down?

An email BCC snafu has seen Symantec-owned Veritas – while trying to deal with an information leakage – out roughly 200 of its partners to each other after it sent all of them an email telling them about the Pearson VUE data breach.

The breach at the Pearson Credential Manager (PCM) was announced on 23 November. However, Veritas only decided to acknowledge that it was affected on the 3 December.

In an email seen by The Register, Veritas informed partners that the "information in this Pearson database is believed to be limited to names, postal addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, employee/partner ID numbers, company name, and employee role and subdivision information".

The PCM system supports a number of companies' certification tracking programmes, including network hardware outfits Cisco and F5.

"Veritas candidates were not asked to provide Social Security numbers, date of birth or payment card information within the Pearson Credential Management System, and all passwords in this database were encrypted" the email stated.

At the time, Cisco noted that it wouldn't be the worst hit and informed its users that only their "name, mailing address, email address and phone number" may have been compromised,

The firm added: "[W]hile you may see reports of additional types of personal information being potentially compromised on the PCM platform, we have been informed that this is not the case with respect to the Cisco certification user profiles".

Veritas was unavailable for comment at the time of publication. We will update this article if the company gets back to us. ®

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