Kickstarter has exploded in 2012, with a number of projects that have been posted on the crowd source funding site generating over $1 million in backing, with one (the Pebble eWatch) now at over $10 million. This weekend, Kickstarted admitted that a bug on its site briefly exposed the details of unreleased projects.
In a post on Kickstarter's blog, the company said the bug was generated by the site's API when Kickstarter launched its new website design on April 24th. The bug was found on Friday, May 11th and then fixed that same day. Kickstarter claims:
The bug made accessible the project description, goal, duration, rewards, video, image, location, category, and user name for unlaunched projects. No account or financial data was made accessible.
The bug was apparently discovered by a Wall Street Journal reporter who then contacted Kickstarter to inform them of the issue. Outside of the reporter's actions, Kickstarter claims that 48 unlaunched projects were accessed by outsiders. That included some access by Kickstarter's own programmers as they worked on the API.
The site stated:
Obviously our users' data is incredibly important to us. Even though limited information was made accessible through this bug, it is completely unacceptable. We want to underline once again that zero account or financial information was at any time made accessible by this bug.
