Durex India eStore spills customers' personal details

Not electronically tested

A site that sold Durex condoms in India has threatened a whistleblower with a legal nastygram in the wake of an admitted security breach involving leaked client details.

Problems with the kohinoorpassion.com site surfaced earlier this month after a customer noticed that simply changing the order ID numbers in a URL allowed voyeurs to browse the names, address, contact number and order details of customers of the site. Even though the snafu did not expose credit card details it still involved an unpleasant leak that created a potentially messy situation for everyone involved.

kohinoorpassion.com acts as an agent for the Durex India e-store. Orders dating from February 2009 up until the breach was exposed on 5 March were exposed by insecure coding on the site.

The security problem at kohinoorpassion.com was quickly fixed, after the customer (who calls himself the Durex Whistleblower) went out of his way to notify all relevant parties of the problem. He received a hamper from the grateful prophylactic provider.

But that wasn't the end of the matter, as the Durex Whistleblower was accused by SSL International (which owns the Durex brand worldwide) and local marketing agency TTK-LIG of downloading customer details. He challenged this accusation in the latest update to his specially constructed Durex Data Breach blog, published on Tuesday.

A notice on the Durex India eStore front page, also posted on Tuesday, admits the breach and apologises to customers:

We wish to inform our customers that on the website, limited transactional details could have been accessible for a restricted time window. These details did not include credit card or other financial information which remain secure at all times. SSL and TTK-LIG takes data security extremely seriously and we have identified the cause and taken immediate remedial action. The modifications put in place ensure that unauthorized access cannot happen again. We are completely confident that the website is now fully secure and would like to apologise to all our customers for any inconvenience they may have experienced. Customers with any concerns about this should contact our helpline on 044-28115800.

An overview of the whole incident can be found on the Databreaches.net blog here. ®