Inquiry into security breach at Blacknight

INTERNET HOSTING company Blacknight is investigating a security breach that could have put clients’ personal details at risk.

Although Carlow-based Blacknight is still trying to establish the scale of the breach at a Dublin data centre, it said no financial data had been compromised. The incident may have affected the email addresses of more than 40,000 customers.

The situation was discovered after some customers contacted the company about spam messages they were receiving to email accounts provided to Blacknight. It is not yet known who carried out the attack, or why Blacknight was targeted. “Unfortunately the reality is that we and our customers are attacked on a daily basis,” said Blacknight chief executive Michele Neylon. He apologised to customers for the incident. “We’re trying to deal with it as responsibly as we can.”

Customers were informed by email of the issue this morning. As the news spread, some took to Twitter to express their concerns and seek advice.

Mr Neylon said the data protection commissioner is aware of the breach, which happened on January 31st. The Garda will also be contacted in connection with the investigation.

The ICANN-accredited webhosting company is advising customers to change passwords for their Blacknight accounts following the incident, and to watch for suspicious activity on online accounts.

The breach has also triggered a review of security at the company to prevent a recurrence of the issue, said Mr Neylon.

Blacknight provides a range of hosting and web domain registration services, offering domains from dot-ie and dot-com to dot-biz and dot-xxx.

The company, which is Irish-owned, hosts more than 120,000 domains, and has servers in two Dublin-based data centres. There have been a number of high-profile data breaches in recent months, with electronics giant Sony suffering one of the biggest in April last year. Millions of customers were warned their accounts and personal details could have been compromised in the attack on Sony’s PlayStation Network and Qiriocity service.