Girl Scouts data breach exposed personal information of 2,800 members

A Girl Scouts of America branch in California suffered a security breach, hackers accessed data of 2,800 girls and their families.

Hackers breached the Orange County, Calif. branch of the Girl Scouts of America, potentially exposing personal information for 2,800 members and their families.

According to the Girl Scouts of Orange County, an unknown threat actor gained access to an email account operated by the organization and used it to send messages.

The account was compromised from Sept. 30 to Oct. 1, Girl Scouts of Orange County notified every member whose data has been compromised.

“Out of an abundance of caution, we are notifying everyone whose information was in this email account,” Salcido added.

According to GSOC, the account was used in the past to arrange travel for group members and for this reason hackers may have been able to obtain personal data with their account access.

In a letter sent to members, Christina Salcido, vice president of mission operations for GSOC, confirmed that attackers may have accessed to names, birth dates, home addresses, insurance policy numbers and health history for some members.

Experts warn of possible social-engineering-based cyber attacks leveraging the exposed info.

GSOC will improve the security of the portal used to arrange the members’ travels and in response to the incident deleted any email containing their data

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Orange County, hacking)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.