Lessons Learned From the Redtail Data Breach

March 4, 2020: It’s an anniversary, but not one for celebrating. A year ago, Brian McLaughlin learned that end-clients’ sensitive personal information, held by his software company, Redtail Technology, had been discovered on the open internet.

On the night of March 3, 2019, Kathryn Duryea, a lawyer and trust officer, stumbled across her name, Social Security number and other sensitive personal information in a Google search. Her phone call to Redtail the next day set off a chain of events that sent the Sacramento, Calif.-based customer relationship management software developer scrambling to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.

Data breaches can be particularly devastating for tech companies, and have affected businesses large and small, from massive asset managers, like BlackRock, to data-centric financial service support companies, like Capital Forensics. Half of small- and medium-sized businesses have been victims of cyberattacks and “over 60 percent of those attacked go out of business,” according to 2015 testimony to Congress by Dr. Jane LeClair, COO of the National Cybersecurity Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based academic and research center associated with Excelsior College.  

But a year after the breach, McLaughlin has used the crisis as an opportunity to make top-to-bottom changes in the business he bootstrapped more than a decade ago.

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