The Office of the Maine Attorney General announced it has temporarily disabled its data breach portal in response to fake submissions.
Maine is one of a small number of US states in which the Attorney General requires organizations experiencing data breaches to report the total number of individuals affected nationwide — not just the number of impacted state residents — when notifying authorities.
The web service cataloged nearly 6,000 incidents reported since mid-2020 at the time of its takedown. The entries in the database in most cases listed the total number of affected individuals and provided important information on the impact and extent of a data breach.
The fake data breach reports that triggered the shutdown targeted the online virtual world platform VRChat and the popular communication platform Discord.
VRChat published a blog post clarifying that the breach notice submitted on its behalf — claiming that 2.4 million of its users were affected — was fake.
