A message from our President

Hi everyone.

I’m Lauren, president of DonorPerfect, and I’m gonna start with an apology. I am so very sorry. I know that losing access to DonorPerfect for the past 2 days, such a busy and important time of year, is just incredibly, incredibly tough. I know what it means for Read More

Hi everyone.

I’m Lauren, president of DonorPerfect, and I’m gonna start with an apology. I am so very sorry. I know that losing access to DonorPerfect for the past 2 days, such a busy and important time of year, is just incredibly, incredibly tough. I know what it means for your mission. I don’t take it lightly and neither do the more than 200 people that work as part of the DonorPerfect team.

You deserve a clear explanation, so I want to tell you directly what we’re dealing with and what has happened. Over the past two weeks, our team was working through a series of issues with DonorPerfect. At first, they looked like separate technical problems, but on the evening of November 10th, we realized they weren’t separate at all. They were all coming from a single advanced AI agent that was launching fast, constantly evolving attacks across several of our systems. Our donation forms, our website, our internal CRM and DonorPerfect itself.

Now, when we saw this new and increased activity from that agent, we acted right away. We made the very, very difficult decision to take DonorPerfect offline. Think of it like a quarantine. When something harmful threatens to spread, you isolate it to contain the risk. That’s what we did. We cut DonorPerfect off to protect your data.

It was not an easy decision. Probably one of the hardest calls that our team had to make, but I think it was the right one. Your donors trust you, you trust us, and protecting that trust had to come first. Since then, our team has been working around the clock. Now, attacks like this have happened across the tech industry before. We are not the first and we certainly will not be the last. So, there’s some silver lining in the fact that there’s a proven playbook for how to respond to incidents like this. We’re following that playbook closely. We’re being guided by outside security experts, and we’ve reported the incident to the FBI.

The good news is that we’ve already restored several of our systems safely and securely. DonorPerfect is by far the most complex system, so it’s taking the longest. And we’re bringing it back carefully, one step at a time. Before we let you back in, we want to be absolutely certain it’s secure and working the way that you need it to. And DonorPerfect isn’t alone in this. Earlier today, I spoke with other technology leaders that serve the nonprofit industry, and I’ve confirmed that at least 2 other companies have been hit by the same automated agent, a threat actor known as ZHA. Now, we’ve reached out to several technology firms in the nonprofit space to offer our help and share what we’ve learned. This is bigger than any one company and I strongly believe that the more that we work together, the safer the whole nonprofit community will be.

Now, a few practical things that I think that you should know. When DonorPerfect is fully restored, you’re going to be asked to set a new password. We’re doing this out of an abundance of caution because keeping your systems and data safe is essential. In the meantime, we are here to help. If you have an urgent deadline like a year-end appeal that cannot wait, please reach out to our support team and we’ll do everything we can to get you the data that you need.

Please make sure you’re subscribed to our status page at status.donorPerfect.com, where you will be able to keep up to date with the latest news. And finally, to say it’s been a hard week is an incredible understatement. I want you to know that we’re working so hard to fully restore the service as quickly and as responsibly as possible.

Thank you so much for your patience and for the work that you do every day. We will get through this together.