TaskRabbit, the on-demand home-service platform acquired last October by Ikea, announced that it has taken down its site and app in order to investigate a cybersecurity incident.
Update: By April 18, the site is back up, accompanied by this letter from CEO Stacy Brown-Philpot.
Founded in 2009, TaskRabbit was an early “gig-economy” success. Using a smartphone app to facilitate task-matching, TaskRabbit allows customers needing help with a home service to find “taskers” who have the necessary skills. Typical tasks are services like cleaning up a yard, organizing a closet or delivering a package across town. Last October, TaskRabbit was acquired by Ikea.
The company said it was working with a cybersecurity firm but didn’t specify what happened, how many people may have been affected or how it learned of the security breach.
The company said it had notified clients and “taskers,” those who offer their services and have been vetted by the company, and said it would reschedule any uncompleted tasks and compensate workers for the tasks that couldn’t be completed Monday because of the disruption, according to WSJ.com.
The message now appearing on the site’s homepage (4.27.2018)
Dear TaskRabbit Community,
TaskRabbit is currently investigating a cybersecurity incident. We understand how important your personal information is and are working with an outside cybersecurity firm and law enforcement to determine the specifics. The app and the website are offline while our team works on this.
We will be back in contact with you with more information once we have it. As an immediate precaution, if you used the same password on other sites or apps as you did for TaskRabbit, we recommend you change those now.
Thank you for your patience while we investigate the issue and for being such an important part of our community.
– TaskRabbit Team
istock
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