The Coffee Meets Bagel data breach was unfortunately revealed on Valentine’s Day. I.e. a dating app revealed a breach on the day of love and romance…
With the data breach reportedly having happened on 11th February 2019, I suppose its just a case of bad timing that notifications ended up being on Valentine’s Day. Either way, the American-based dating service that is used in the UK has suffered a breach.
This isn’t the first dating website that has been targeted for a data breach. We doubt it will be the last as well.
About the Coffee Meets Bagel data breach
The Coffee Meets Bagel data breach is reported to have taken place on 11th February 2019. An unauthorised party is said to have gained access to a partial list of user information. The data that has been exposed is said to include names and email addresses.
It may be that as many as 6m users of the dating service that makes connections using Facebook for people to date “friends of friends” are affected. Victims of the breach were repeatedly emailed on Valentine’s Day to inform them of the breach.
Should people be worried about the Coffee Meets Bagel data breach?
In our view, people should always be worried about these kinds of cybersecurity incidents. The Coffee Meets Bagel data breach can be just as serious for victims, even if the data exposed appears to be restricted to a list of names and email addresses.
Ultimately, that may be enough for criminals to target people. With a list of people and their contact emails who they know use the dating service, criminals could target people for phishing scams and fraud. It wouldn’t be difficult for someone to make an email look genuine enough to dupe someone into entering more data on to a spoof website.
People need to be vigilant.
We saw from the huge TalkTalk data breach that we’re involved in that criminals posed as TalkTalk and targeted victims of the breach. People have fallen for these types of scams, and it can cost victims thousands of pounds.
Hopefully, the Coffee Meets Bagel data breach will not develop into anything more serious.