Email marketing and newsletter giant Mailchimp says it was hacked and that dozens of customers’ data was exposed. It’s the second time the company was hacked in the past six months. Worse, this breach appears to be almost identical to a previous incident.
The Intuit-owned company said in an unattributed blog post that its security team detected an intruder on January 11 accessing one of its internal tools used by Mailchimp customer support and account administration, though the company did not say for how long the intruder was in its systems, if known.
Mailchimp said the hacker targeted its employees and contractors with a social engineering attack, in which someone uses manipulation techniques by phone, email or text to gain private information, like passwords.
The hacker then used those compromised employee passwords to gain access to data on 133 Mailchimp accounts, which the company notified of the intrusion.
One of those targeted accounts belongs to e-commerce giant WooCommerce. In a note to customers, WooCommerce said it was notified by Mailchimp a day later that the breach may have exposed the names, store web addresses and email addresses of its customers, though it said no customer passwords or other sensitive data was taken.
