Privacy Breach Notification
Our external IT infrastructure partner has been the victim of a cyber-attack, resulting in a privacy breach that may involve our customers’ personal information. We’ve been notified that our IT partner’s systems were illegally accessed by an unknown and unauthorised third party, which has resulted in our server being compromised.
What does this mean?
At this stage, we are still working with our IT partner to understand the full extent of the breach, however personal information, potentially including health information, and any other information contained on our server, may have been compromised. Our IT partner is undertaking an extensive investigation to determine the full extent of the information accessed by the third party.
The New Zealand Privacy Commissioner has been notified of this incident, both by our IT partner and ourselves.
What we’re doing about it
We are taking this situation extremely seriously and are incredibly disappointed about this incident. As soon as our IT partner became aware of what happened, they shut down our server and alerted us to the potential breach. They are in the process of investigating how the breach occurred, and we are being provided with daily updates. We have been working from a temporary server using computers that were offline at the time of the attack, to ensure unauthorised access cannot continue.
We will provide further updates as more information becomes available. If we are able to identify specific individuals whose information was accessed we will endeavour to notify them.
What you need to do
If you are a customer of Vautier Pharmacies, we strongly advise you follow these guidelines, to reduce the risk of potential harm:
Please avoid clicking on any links in text messages or emails, or opening any emails that appear to come from “Vautier Pharmacy” but have a suspicious email address that does not end in ‘@vautierpharmacy.co.nz.’ We do not send links within text messages.
Ignore any unexpected invoices and do not follow instructions to make any unusual payments to Vautier Pharmacy. We are confident that there was no customer bank card details stored on the affected server, but we will inform you if we are made aware otherwise.
Remain on alert to any unusual emails, texts or phone calls that claim to be from Vautier Pharmacy. If you are unsure as to whether an email, text or phone call is legitimate, please don’t hesitate to email us and we can confirm whether we have recently contacted you.
We value your business and respect that the privacy of your information is paramount.
Still have questions?
If you have any questions or concerns, please contact our Privacy Officer office@vautierpharmacy.co.nz.
If you are not happy with our response, you can contact the Office of the Privacy Commissioner to lodge a complaint. You have the right to do this under the Privacy Act 2020.
On behalf of the Vautier Pharmacy team, we would like to thank you for your support and understanding as we work through this continually evolving situation.
Yours sincerely,
Lynne Vautier (Director) and Margot Findlay (Business Manager)
