WeTransfer Incident Shares Transferred Files with Unintended Users

WeTransfer files were transferred to unintended users on June 16 and 17. The scope of the incident is not clear, but the company promptly logged out affected accounts and disabled the transfer links.

• By Kaitlyn DeHaven
• Jun 26, 2019

WeTransfer posted a security notice on June 21 informing users of a security incident they had discovered on Monday, June 17. In the incident, WeTransfer emails including file transfer links were sent to unintended e-mail addresses for two days – June 16 and 17.

After the company discovered the security incident, they logged the users out of their accounts and deactivated the links, making the files inaccessible. For some users, they reset their passwords. Then, they sent out emails to the affected users and posted the security notice on their website. WeTransfer has stated they do not know what caused the security incident.

There is a way to password-protect your transferred files on WeTransfer, ensuring that the end user is also the intended user, but it is not available on the free version of WeTransfer.

Jamie Brown, an affected user who received a notice from WeTransfer informing him that his files had been sent to unintended users, told Naked Security the files he was transferring were not overly confidential, but others may not have been so lucky.

“Thankfully we mostly use WeTransfer for sending and receiving brand photos for use on Chicmi.com – so they’re mostly heading into the public domain anyway, and the worst that might happen is an embargo being broken for an upcoming event,” Brown said. “However, I’m sure others are not so relaxed about it, bearing in mind the way the service is used.”

WeTransfer stated that they would let their users know as soon as they had an update on the cause of the situation, but that the scope of the incident will not be revealed until they have more information.

“We understand how important our users’ data is and never take their trust in our service for granted,” WeTransfer said in a statement. “We are still investigating the complete scope and cause of the incident, and will update further as soon as possible.”