(30 April 2010, St. Louis, MO) On April 29th a blogger gained inappropriate access to a v-Fluence Interactive server Web portal used by our Internet content screeners and analysts to code monitoring data.  This unethical hacking was limited to an out-of-date application on a monitoring data entry portal and one occurrence by this one unauthorized user.  At no time was any v-Fluence client-owned or proprietary client information accessible via this portal and no such data were compromised.

The only data available on this space were links to publicly available Internet content with draft excerpts and historical analysis summaries of that content.  The screen shot reveals v-Fluence images of Internet monitoring systems and protocols established to support U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulatory compliant reporting associated with potential adverse events and other regulated content for pharmaceutical, medical device and similar regulated healthcare organizations.  No company e-mail, legal or other files were housed on this server.  No other servers or v-Fluence company content were compromised.

This unauthorized access of a protected computer was conducted by a blogger following a log file from a monitoring bot from which he gained unauthorized access to one data entry portal hosted on one of our servers.  This blogger then collected a screen shot of this content for purposes of publicly distributing the data in an attempt to cause reputational damage to our company and clients by name.  This unauthorized access was immediately identified by our data and software management team and traced back to the source.  The hacked server was closed as a precaution and the application through which the hacker gained unauthorized access was removed.

While no specific client data was breached, we take any illegal or unauthorized access of a v-Fluence computer seriously and report such cybercrime activities to the appropriate authorities.

For more information please contact info@v-Fluence.com or call (877) 835-8362.