Luxury retailer Fortnum & Mason has become the latest big brand to be involved in a significant data breach after the company admitted the details of around 23,000 competition and survey participants had been compromised.
According to a spokesperson at Fortnum & Mason “At 17.26pm on Friday 29 June, Typeform, a company that provides services that we have used in the past to collect survey responses and voting preferences, notified us that they had suffered a data breach and unfortunately some of our data had been compromised.”
Those affected were competition and survey participants who inputted into a Typeform form.
“For the majority of people, only the email address has been exposed,” the spokesperson added. “For a smaller proportion of customers, other data such as address, contact number and social handle has been included. These forms did not request bank or payment details, or require passwords.”
No-one’s bank details or passwords have been involved, and money and accounts are safe, they said. “All those affected have been contacted.”
Fortnum & Mason was also quick to point out that there had been no breach of it's website, and that all of the data it holds was unaffected by the incident.
“We have disabled any and all Typeform forms existing on our website and will not work with Typeform until we are assured that; there is no further risk, that all our data has been removed from their servers and that their security measures have been improved. We have been informed that Typeform have fixed the root cause and are undertaking forensic investigations.”