Ah, the unintentional group email. Perhaps it was a joke in poor taste, or something meant for select individuals, but more than likely, you’ve never sent anything too important to the wrong people. Certainly not anything on the scale of Woolworths’ recent gaffe, where it fired off an email to over a thousand people containing a spreadsheet with personal details and gift voucher links.
This post originally appeared on Gizmodo Australia.
The Age managed to get its hands on the email (and the spreadsheet) and according to journalist Lisa Visentin, comes complete with “thousands of customers and a downloadable link to 7941 vouchers”. Woolworths uncovered the monumental error yesterday morning, with the vouchers themselves a part of several Groupon deals.
As for the specific details leaked via the spreadsheet, it appears to be just names and emails, so no credit card or other financial information. The worst aspect of course is that anyone who received the email could use the vouchers — something which has occurred en masse, going by a number of customer interviews in the article.
Woolworths didn’t have much to say when contacted by The Age, other than that it’s “experience[d] a technical fault with an e-voucher” offer. Undoubtedly we’ll hear more about it in the weeks to follow.
It sure isn’t the best advertisement for the company — or Groupon, for that matter.
Woolworths leaks $1 million of gift cards in massive data breach debacle [The Age]
Comments
4 responses to “Voucher Codes & Personal Details Exposed In Woolworths Accidental Mass Email”
And this is why the new metadata retention is a terrible idea, this will inevitably happen, except it will be on a much larger scale
Nice to know they run the vouchers through an Excel spreadsheet 😉
Yup… when I bought a pile of vouchers earlier this year, I was sent a spreadsheet listing the numbers.
Yeah, getting Woolies to run that metadata scheme was just stupid.