Typeform’s data breach and how it may affect you

We have recently been notified that Typeform — a service we sometimes use to collect survey responses via this website and our products — suffered a data breach. Typeform reports that an unauthorised third party was able to download a partial backup of respondent data, which included some people’s names, email addresses and phone numbers.

Angel Solutions are in the process of analysing exactly what respondent data was accessed in this incident. Many of our affected surveys were anonymous and contained no identifiable data about respondents. However, we are aware that some surveys required people to enter their contact details.

We are contacting every person we can identify who submitted an email address in one of our affected Typeforms, notifying them of what data may have been obtained and how they can stay safe online. If you do not receive an email from us, you have not been affected.

We have also spoken to the ICO today, who were already aware of this incident and have advised us that our response is appropriate.

Angel Solutions are one of thousands of organisations affected by the Typeform breach. This survey tool is used by well-known companies accross the world, including Apple, AirBnB, Uber, Monzo and others. We therefore advise anyone who has completed online surveys and forms — whoever these were published by — to be extra vigilant online, especially when it comes to opening emails. Only open messages or links from people and companies that you know and trust.

We’re sincerely sorry for any inconvenience or worry this incident has caused.

How this will be prevented in future

Typeform responded immediately and fixed the source of the breach to prevent any further intrusion. We are confident they are taking appropriate steps to ensure the ongoing security of their survey tool.

In addition, we are actioning some extra steps to help protect any data that people submit to us via third party services in future.

We are:

• Contacting every person we believe may have been affected by the Typeform data breach;
• Conducting a review of external services we use, including their privacy policies and data protection measures. We may stop using some third parties or alter the ways in which we use them as a result of this review;
• Reviewing Data Processing Agreements with Typeform and other third party services used on our sites;
• Reviewing all of our existing Typeforms to ensure they only collect identifiable data when absolutely necessary;
• Adding a Typeform Deletion Policy to ensure that all data submissions are deleted from external servers in an appropriate timeframe.

More information

More information from Typeform can be found at www.typeform.com/data-breach-june-2018.

Angel Solutions is ISO 27001 certified and Cyber Essentials Plus certified. We process large and complex data sets every day and take data security extremely seriously. You can read our Terms of Use and Privacy Policies online, both of which have been recently reviewed and updated.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us and we will respond as quickly as possible.