Cyber Incident Victim: Vehicle Donation Processing Center
Date:
Jul 2012
Location:
United States of America
Summary
The Vehicle Donation Processing Center experienced a cybersecurity incident involving unauthorized access to donor information, potentially compromising personal details such as names, addresses, driver's license numbers, and Social Security numbers. The breach affected individuals who donated vehicles through the center over a multi-year span, with data exposure occurring during an extended period before discovery. Notifications were issued to inform impacted donors of the incident.
| CIA Posture | Motives | Tactics, Techniques & Procedures |
|---|---|---|
| Available to members | 1 motive | 1 technique |
| Threat Actors | Type | Location |
|---|---|---|
| 0 actors | Available to members | Available to members |
Description
The Vehicle Donation Processing Center experienced a data breach exposing personal information of individuals who donated vehicles to charities through its services between 2005 and 2014. The unauthorized access occurred over an extended period, spanning from July 2012 through May 2015. Compromised data included donors' full names, postal addresses, Driver's License numbers, and Social Security numbers. The organization began notifying affected individuals via mailed letters in July 2015, approximately two months after concluding their investigation into the security incident. No specific details regarding the attack vector, number of affected donors, or identity of threat actors were disclosed in public notifications. The breach timeline indicates persistent vulnerabilities existed within the processing center's systems for nearly three years before detection.
Impacted donors faced significant privacy risks due to the exposure of highly sensitive personally identifiable information. Social Security numbers combined with driver's license details created substantial identity theft opportunities for malicious actors. The notification did not specify whether financial fraud or misuse of information had been confirmed following the breach. Charity vehicle donors from a nine-year service window were potentially affected, suggesting a broad temporal scope despite the narrower three-year exposure period. The processing center's public disclosure provided no information about remediation offers, credit monitoring services, or specific corrective actions taken to secure systems following the breach discovery.