McAfee sends out personal details in email

Security vendor McAfee has sent out a bulk email containing the contact details of over 1400 security professionals that attended its recent conference in Sydney.

The email revealed demographic data collected during the registration process for the McAfee Strategic Security Summit, held in Sydney on Friday July 17, as well as the full contact details of 1408 people who attended or registered.

The details included the name, company, job title, address, phone number and email of all those who attended, according to a Twitter post and series of Flickr images posted by sound engineer and teacher Steve Murphy, one of the people who received the email. 

McAfee responded to the security breach by sending a follow-up email to the unintended recipients of the information.

"You may have been inadvertently sent information containing registration details from our recent security summit," the email read. "This was sent in error and we therefore request that this information be deleted and we sincerely apologise for any inconvenience caused as a result of this."

A spokesperson from McAfee told iTnews that the company is uncertain as to how many people received the attachment in error.

"McAfee managed to intercept this email before it was sent to all recipients, so it is uncertain how many recipients received the list," the spokesperson said.

"Due to a human error, the contact list for a seminar (held two weeks ago in Sydney) was mistakenly attached to a promotional e-mail being sent to conference delegates," the spokesperson said.

"This contact list included common conference registration information but did not include any financial information."

McAfee said it believed it had taken "the appropriate steps to inform people of the mistake".