Blippy Credit Card Leak Is Isolated Incident

Dan Hope

Date: 23 April 2010 Time: 12:08 PM ET

Identity theft.
CREDIT: dreamstime

Earlier this morning tech blogs across the Internet posted articles saying social network Blippy had posted credit card numbers and user data throughout Google search results. The reality, though still serious, was not so disastrous.

Blippy quickly released a press release explaining that only four user accounts were compromised, and not from a leak or a glitch in the system. The data leak was actually from an isolated incident months ago during the service's beta period.

"We addressed the problem and scrubbed the data clean months ago. But the information was still available in Google's cache, which we didn't know about," said Ashvin Kumar, Co-Founder & CEO, in an interview with TechNewsDaily.

The problem has since been fixed, but a Google cache of four users' information remained on Google's servers, unknown to Blippy. The cache gained mainstream attention when someone posted a tweet with an image of Google search results containing the sensitive information.

"We reached out to Google, immediately," Kumar said. "This is one of the most important things to us, making sure data is safe and consumers feel comfortable using our service."

Google has since cleared the cached data from Blippy, eliminating the problem, and Blippy is contacting those whose data was displayed in the search results. Blippy is also reviewing ways to increase site security.

Mostly, the company wants users to know the incident was not a result of hacking or a site-wide security breach.

"The headlines made it seem like every user's credit card numbers were spread across the Internet. It's really four users in a Google cache," Kumar said. "It's definitely serious, but the headlines were pretty sensationalistic, so that frustrates us a bit."