Education tech giant gets an F for security after years of repeat blunders
Sloppy data security at education tech giant Chegg exposed students and workers' personal information not once but four times in various ways over four years, according to the FTC.
"Chegg took shortcuts with millions of students' sensitive information," Samuel Levine, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a."Today's order requires the company to strengthen security safeguards, offer consumers an easy way to delete their data, and limit information collection on the front end."
In addition to the scholarship search data that the tech company collected and retained, for its online tutoring services Chegg recorded videos of the students as well as harvesting the usual employment information from its workers. This includes employees' names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, and financial information.
The laundry list of what Chegg allegedly did wrong reads like a how-to-get-breached-for-dummies book. For example, the company allowed employees and contractors to use a single AWS access key that provided full admin privileges over all data in the S3 databases. It also failed to rotate access keys to the S3 databases, and stored personal information in plain text instead of using encryption.
A year later, a former contractor accessed one of Chegg's S3 databases using an AWS Root Credential, and stole a database containing about 40 million users' data. This included email addresses, first and last names, passwords, and, for some users, their religious denomination, heritage, date of birth, parents' income range, sexual orientation, and disabilities.
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