Important Security Announcement From PagerDuty



July 30, 2015

by Andrew Miklas

Our customers and community are very important to us, and to maintain the transparency that is essential to keeping your trust, we wanted to tell you about a recent event.

On July 9, PagerDuty detected an unauthorized intrusion by an attacker who gained access to some information about our customers. Within a few hours of the intrusion, our team was able to shut down the attack, and we immediately took steps to mitigate the issue, including enhancing our monitoring and detection capabilities, and further hardening our environment.

We have found no evidence that corporate, technical, financial, or sensitive end user information, including phone numbers, was exposed by this incident. As you know, we do not collect customers’ social security numbers and we do not store or have access to customer credit card numbers. This incident also had no impact on our ability to provide services to our customers.

We engaged a leading cyber security forensics firm to investigate the attack, and validate that the measures we took to address this issue – and our security practices more generally – meet the high standards to which we hold ourselves. We also notified law enforcement and are cooperating fully with their investigation into this matter.

Based on the investigation, the attacker bypassed multiple layers of authentication and gained unauthorized access to an administrative panel provided by one of our infrastructure providers. With this access, they were able to log into a replica of one of PagerDuty’s databases. The evidence indicates that the attacker gained access to users’ names, email addresses, hashed passwords and public calendar feed URLs.

Passwords are hashed1 with a salt and pepper, and we have no evidence that the attacker was able to access the pepper, which makes it computationally infeasible that the hashed passwords can be used in any way by the attacker. The calendar feed URLs provide users with a read-only calendar of when they are on-call.

While we are confident in the strength of the protections used to secure users’ passwords, as a precaution we are asking our users to set new strong passwords at this time. Users that do not reset their password by Monday, August 3rd at 12:00pm Pacific Time will be automatically logged out of the website and will receive an email prompting them to reset their password. At no time will alert delivery be affected by this process.

We also recommend that customers reset calendar feed URLs and revoke and re-add access to any mobile devices linked to their PagerDuty account.

We realize that an attacker might use the names and email addresses exposed during this incident to target customers with phishing attacks, so we urge you to be vigilant in protecting your identity online. PagerDuty will never ask for your password or other sensitive information via email.

I have been personally involved in our response every step of the way. We value your trust and confidence in our company and we strive to meet the high standards we set for ourselves. I take this event as an opportunity to review and enhance our security, and remain committed to strong internal security practices and processes.

We apologize for this incident. If you have questions, you can contact us directly at support@pagerduty.com.