Dear Piqosity Students, Parents, and Educators,

This is a notice that our servers have suffered a security breach.

What happened?

On July 2, 2023 at approximately 9pm US Central Time, we discovered that our Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosting account had been the target of unauthorized access and our primary and secondary systems deleted.

What are the latest updates?
(July 6, 2023 at 2:35pm, Houston)

We restored normal app operations around 10:40am on Thursday morning. We continue to do quality assurance testing and are fixing issues as we become aware of them. As of Thursday afternoon, we are only aware the following issues:

  • some missing question images
  • custom subdomains for organizations like “myschool.piqosity.com” are not yet working

What information was involved?

AWS hosts all Piqosity resources. Compromised information includes user e-mail addresses, in-app activity logs, and any information you may have added to your public profile. However, our databases do not contain credit card numbers, and individual user passwords are encrypted.

What are we doing?

Our engineers are working around the clock. On July 5 we created a temporary app for paid users to access our services while we continue to work on bringing full operations back online. We restored normal operations on July 6 around 10:40am Houston time.

We are doubling down on our security and working with Amazon AWS security to conduct a root cause analysis to determine how our AWS account was breached. Improving our security includes rotating our API keys, implementing IP address restrictions, and routine auditing.

What you can do?

  1. Contact us if you are unable to use the app or access your paid content as expected

What else is there to know?

For the latest updates, you can check our blog at:
https://piqosity.com/2023/07/02/app-service-disruption/

And contact our support department at:
https://piqosity.freshdesk.com/support/home

Piqosity is a relatively small, Houston-based startup company dedicated to improving education globally, ensuring that every student has a fair shot at success. We are devastated that there are horrible people who undertake this type of destructive and malicious activity. We will carry on undeterred by our goal of improving the world around us.

We appreciate your support and understanding as we work through this unprecedented attack on our systems.

Sincerely,

Shelby Joe
Founder