Vudu customer information stolen the old fashioned way

Vudu, Inc. is a content delivery and media technology company responsible for Vudu-branded interactive media services and devices. Vudu distributes full-length movies over the Internet to television, and was acquired by Walmart in March 2010.

Vudu offices in Santa Clara, CA, suffered a breach in security, that was effected the old fashion way: a good old breaking and entering. The burglars physically removed hard drives that contained customer information amongst other items.

Vudu offered this statement: There was a break-in at the VUDU offices, and a number of items were stolen, including but not limited to hard drives.

Our investigation thus far indicates that these hard drives contained customer information, including names, email addresses, postal addresses, phone numbers, account activity, dates of birth and the last four digits of some credit card numbers.

It's important to note that the drives did NOT contain full credit card numbers, as we do not store that information. If you have never set a password on the VUDU site and have only logged in through another site, your password was not on the hard drives.

While the stolen hard drives included VUDU account passwords, those passwords were encrypted. We believe it would be difficult to break the password encryption, but we can't rule out that possibility given the circumstances of this theft. Therefore, we have reset all customer passwords.

Customers were not immediately notified of the breach and according to Vudu it was at the request of law enforcement in order to preserve the integrity of the ongoing investigation. During that time Vudu states that they were actively reconstructing all of the lost data, and preparing to issue notification to affected customers.