Blackbaud Security Incident

The Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation recently learned about a data security incident at one of our vendors, Blackbaud, which works with many nonprofits to support their fundraising and engagement efforts. Many Blackbaud clients, including this Foundation, were impacted by this incident, in which the hackers obtained some of our constituents’ personally identifiable information. 

Please note that the incident did not impact credit card information, bank account information, username, passwords, or Social Security numbers.

A full description of the incident can be found here, on Blackbaud’s site: https://www.blackbaud.com/securityincident. Blackbaud believes the impacted data was destroyed and not misused, but as an added precaution, they have engaged experts to continuously monitor the dark web for an indefinite timeframe, in order to ensure no stolen data is made publicly available. In addition, as part of their efforts to help prevent something like this from happening in the future, Blackbaud has already implemented several changes that will protect their files from subsequent incidents. 

The Foundation takes the protection and proper use of your information very seriously, and our contractual agreements required Blackbaud to keep our constituents’ information confidential, including having security procedures in place to help prevent these types of incidents. Therefore, once we were informed of the incident by Blackbaud, we immediately started the process of reviewing the impacted files, in partnership with a leading forensic IT firm, to determine who may have been affected, and to notify them. We are also exploring all options to ensure this does not happen again, including revisiting our relationship with Blackbaud. 

While no action is required, should you have any further questions regarding this matter, or to determine whether your data may have been impacted, we have set up a specific group of dedicated representatives to assist you. Please do not hesitate to call this External Call Center at (866) 968-0163, Monday through Friday 9 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Eastern Time, or send an email to [email protected].