Skip to main content
Menu Icon
Close

InfoBytes Blog

Financial Services Law Insights and Observations

New York fines supermarket chain $400,000 for mishandled consumer data

Privacy/Cyber Risk & Data Security State Issues New York Settlement State Attorney General Consumer Protection

Privacy, Cyber Risk & Data Security

On June 30, the New York attorney general announced a settlement with a New York-based supermarket chain (respondent) for allegedly leaving more than three million customers’ personal information in unsecured, misconfigured cloud storage containers, which made the data potentially easy to access. The compromised data included customer account usernames and passwords, as well as customer names, email addresses, mailing addresses, and additional data derived from drivers’ license numbers. According to the assurance of discontinuance, a security researcher informed the respondent in 2021 that one of the cloud storage containers was misconfigured from its creation in January 2018 until April 2021, potentially exposing customers’ personal information. A second misconfigured container was identified in May 2021 that had been publicly accessible since November 2018, the AG said, noting that the respondent “immediately reviewed its cloud environment and identified the container, which had a database backup file with over three million records of customer email addresses and account passwords.” The AG asserted that the respondent also “failed to inventory its cloud assets containing personal information, secure all user passwords, and regularly conduct security testing of its cloud assets.” Nor did the retailer maintain long-term logs of its cloud assets, thus making it difficult to security incidents, the AG said.

The terms of the settlement require the respondent to pay $400,000 in penalties to the state. The respondent has also agreed to (i) maintain a comprehensive information security program, including reporting security risks to the company's leadership; (ii) establish practices and policies to maintain an inventory of all cloud assets and to ensure all cloud assets containing personal information have appropriate measures to limit access; (iii) develop a penetration testing program and implement centralized logging and monitoring of cloud asset activity; (iv) establish appropriate password policies and procedures for customer accounts; (v) maintain a reasonable vulnerability disclosure program to enable third parties to disclose vulnerabilities; (vi) establish appropriate practices for customer account management and authentication; and (vii) update its data collection and retention practices to ensure it only collects customers’ personal information when there is a reasonable business purpose for the collection and permanently deletes all personal information collected before the agreement for which no reasonable purpose exists.