Blackbaud Data Security Incident

Here at Austin PBS, we are truly grateful for the continued support for public television in Central Texas by our members and donors. Viewers like you bring essential services and educational programming to everyone in our community. Thank you!

That is why we want to inform you about a recent data security incident experienced by our vendor Blackbaud that may have involved donor contact information. Like many other nonprofits, we contract with Blackbaud to maintain data on our members and supporters. Safeguarding the personal information of our members and supporters is important to us and we do not take the security of that information lightly. We therefore want to explain what we know about the incident and tell you what was done to protect our donors’ information.

Blackbaud was the target of a ransomware attack. Blackbaud recently notified us that the cybercriminal was able to obtain some personally identifying information about Blackbaud’s nonprofit clients' donors and prospective donors, including those of Austin PBS.

After discovering the attack, Blackbaud — together with security experts and law enforcement — investigated the attack and reported to us that no credit card information or bank information was accessed by the cybercriminal or was compromised.

Blackbaud has also hired a third-party team of experts to continue monitoring for any such activity. For additional information about Blackbaud’s response, please visit https://www.blackbaud.com/securityincident.

Blackbaud did quickly identify the vulnerability associated with this incident, including the tactics used by the cybercriminal, and took swift action to fix it. Blackbaud is working to harden their environment through enhancements to access management, network segmentation, deployment of additional endpoint and network-based platforms and Austin PBS will seek to amend its agreement with Blackbaud to include additional data security safeguards.

As a best practice, we recommend that our donors remain vigilant and promptly report any suspicious activity or suspected identity theft to the proper law enforcement authorities.

Thank you for placing your trust in Austin PBS and we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this incident may have caused any of our donors. If you have further questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to reach out to Kaye Kelley at kkelley@klru.org.