{"id":17791,"date":"2011-01-18T10:58:00","date_gmt":"2011-01-18T08:58:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2011-01-18T10:58:00","modified_gmt":"2011-01-18T08:58:00","slug":"south-african-ecommerce-website-user-details-exposed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/internet\/17791-south-african-ecommerce-website-user-details-exposed.html","title":{"rendered":"South African eCommerce website user details exposed"},"content":{"rendered":"

The local Internet market was abuzz recently when Groupon announced the launch of a South African presence<\/a> through the acquisition of daily deal site Twangoo.<\/p>\n

Using the principles of collective buying, Groupon negotiates discounts with popular businesses and shares them with subscribers via daily emails. The deals are activated only when a minimum number of people agree to buy, encouraging subscribers to share the promotion with family and friends.<\/p>\n

Groupon\/Twangoo is however not the only ‘daily deal’ website in South Africa, with competitors such as Wicount and Justhenga battling it out for market share.<\/p>\n

Security problems at WiCount?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reports have emerged that one of the local deal websites, WiCount, is exposing user details, including names, email addresses, customer numbers and even transaction details.<\/p>\n

Public links (URLs) on the WiCount website lead to lists of details regarding its customers, making it possible to extract a lot of private information about the website’s clientèle.<\/p>\n

WiCount director Dan Palay<\/a> told MyBroadband that they are aware of the security problem and that it is caused by their hosting and software platform partner Shopdirect. Palay added that the problem is being attended to, and that it should be solved within the next hour.<\/p>\n

According to Palay, WiCount clients should not be concerned about their credit card details as that information is still secure, and said that they are working hard to ensure that this does not happen again in future.<\/p>\n

Shortly after MyBroadband contacted WiCount, the personal details of their clients were no longer publically available.<\/p>\n

South African eCommerce site user details exposed<\/strong><\/a> << Comments and views<\/p>\n

WiCount Client detials exposure screenshot<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Local deal website WiCount exposes user information including names, e-mail addresses and even transaction details<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17791"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17791"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17791\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}