Breach exposes Barracuda partners and sales leads

Security appliance vendor confirms weekend web site attackers accessed partner contact details

Barracuda Networks has become the latest channel firm to fall foul of cyber attackers, after revealing that a weekend data breach led to partner contact details being exposed.

The security appliance vendor has contacted partners to alert them to the breach, explaining that email addresses and sales contacts were compromised during the attack.

In an email to partners, leaked to ChannelWeb, Michael Hughes, Barracuda's vice president of worldwide sales, confirmed the vendor had been the victim of a "minor data breach".

"Email address and names for marketing and sales leads were accessed," it states. "We apologise for this inconvenience and assure you that steps have been taken to make sure that this will not happen again."

The Barracuda attack comes less than a month after a similar attack on EMC-owned RSA compromised its customers' data.

In a blog post on the Barracuda web site, the vendor continued to play down the breach, blaming it on a firewall abnormality caused by scheduled web site maintenance.

"The Barracuda Web Application Firewall in front of the web site was unintentionally placed in passive monitoring mode and was offline through a maintenance window that started Friday [8 April]," it states.

"Starting Saturday night, an automated script began crawling our site in search of unvalidated parameters [and] discovered a SQL injection vulnerability in a simple PHP script that serves up customer reference case studies by vertical market."

These case studies share the same SQL database the company uses for its marketing programmes, the post explained, which contain the contact details of sales leads, channel partners and some Barracuda employees.

It continued: "The good news is the information compromised was essentially just names and email addresses, and no financial information is stored in those databases."