On November 22, 2018, we discovered that we had a data breach. We launched a thorough investigation and found the following.

Yes, there was a lapse

Adapt inadvertently exposed a secondary database which contained an aggregate of publicly available information.

What data got exposed?

Adapt does not carry any data that would be deemed to be sensitive, such as DOB, gender, SSN, passwords, bank account numbers, etc. The exposed data was NOT our customer data. The server did have information on the name, title, business email address and company of many professionals across the globe.

How was the data exposed?

Adapt had temporarily created a secondary database, which was used to serve information to logged out users and search engines. This was meant to be used by one of our APIs to index our data for search engines. This server was not a part of our production VPN and the IP address of this server was never meant to be public, which was a mistake on our part.

What action did we take?

As soon as we came across the article, we identified and addressed the issue in a few hours. The temporary machine was taken down and an audit of our complete infrastructure was done, including all development, staging and production environments. There were no other vulnerabilities found. We have also introduced more stringent security measures to prevent such incidents in the future.

Our sincere apologies

We would like to acknowledge that we understand the seriousness of this incident and issue our sincerest apologies. We also extend our gratitude to Bob Diachenko of Hacken Proof for alerting us of this issue.

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The section “Collection of Business Contact Information and Company Information” in our privacy policy shows how we collect publicly available data with our community and technology.

We respect business users privacy seriously and remove their information if they reach out to us.  “Are You in Adapt.io?” provides instructions on how to remove your listing from Adapt.io.

If you have any additional questions, please contact us here.