Blippy credit card snafu – UPDATED

Earlier I posted about how some credit card numbers of Blippy users were discovered using nothing more than a simple Google search. Well Paul Boutin over at VentureBeat has some updated news and according to Philip Kaplan, Blippy co-founder, it’s not as bad as it seems.

Below is the email Paul received from Philip on the matter

“Today someone discovered a Google search that displays the credit card numbers of 4 Blippy users.

“We take security seriously and want to assure Blippy users that this was an isolated incident from many months ago in our beta test, and doesn’t affect current users.

“While it looks super-scary and certainly sucks for those few people who were affected, and is embarrassing to us, it’s a lot less bad than it looks.

“Here are the details:

• Say you buy lunch at Quiznos. Your credit card statement shows a complex entry like “Quiznos Inc Store #1234 San Francisco.” But Blippy cleans this up to only show “Quiznos.” We refer to these as the “raw data” vs the “cleaned up data.”
• Raw data is typically harmless. But it turns out that some credit cards (4 out of thousands in this case) show the credit card number in the raw data. For example, “Quiznos Inc Store #1234 from card 4444….”
• Many months ago when we were first building Blippy, some raw (not cleaned up, but typically harmless) data could be viewed in the HTML source of a Blippy web page. The average user would see nothing, but a determined person could see “raw” line items. Still, this was mostly harmless — stuff like store numbers and such. And it was all removed and fixed quickly.
• Enter Google’s cache. Turns out Google indexed some of this HTML, even though it wasn’t visible on the Blippy website. And exposed 4 credit card numbers (but a scary 196 search results).
• We’re working with Google now to remove Blippy from their cache, and they inform us it will be completed within a couple of hours.

“While we take this very seriously and it is a headache for those involved, it’s important to remember that you’re never responsible if someone uses your credit card without your permission. That’s why it’s okay to hand your credit card over to waiters, store clerks, and hundreds of other people who all have access to your credit card numbers.

“We’re making efforts to bolster our security to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again. That includes third-party security audits, and in general being a lot more careful before new features are released, even if it’s during a small, limited beta test period.

“Thank you for reading.”

While it is great that Blippy is on top of this and working with Google to get that information out of their search index it doesn’t change my opinion of the service one iota.