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Residents’ personal details may be at risk from compromised IT systems at a market research business working in our area
In posts to multiple Facebook community groups, with memberships totalling more than 50,000 users, a market research focus group recruiter has been publicising a questionnaire this week, to recruit Hillingdon residents from the wards of Colham and Cowley, Hillingdon East, Uxbridge, West Drayton, Charville, Hillingdon West, and Yiewsly (sic – that’s their spelling).
Offering £60 for residents to attend a focus group, paid for by, as they said, “the end client who… is likely to be one of the main political parties”, the focus groups are to be held this week for 90 minutes each.
This itself may be unexceptional, but the market research company running the focus groups, We See Through (WST Research Limited) has had its website compromised. With little care or security on their website, it remains to be seen how carefully they would treat residents’ personal details. It is not clear how data is handled once it has been submitted through the Google Workspace form linked from the Facebook posts.
One Facebook user said “I did start filling out the questionnaire BUT a lot of local political questions then straight on about national politics and reform just reform. Sounds like a set up …no one will do the interview and you get us to fill out the questionnaire which is all the information you want in the first place.”
The recruiter responded to say “we are an independent market research agency. If you do the research it will be professionally managed to reflect your views. We have 20 places available”but we have concerns about the market research agency, given that their website has been compromised by code which looks Russian in origin. Visitors to their website are redirected variously to adult dating websites, pornographic video websites, affiliate marketing websites, online bookmakers, and websites selling beauty products through affiliate marketing schemes.
We strongly recommend that residents do not give any personal details to this agency, and that anyone who takes part in the focus groups exercises extreme caution.
One of the original posts, advertising the focus groups:
We recorded a video of the compromised (hijacked, or “hacked”) website redirecting to several of the different targets, and uploaded some to YouTube – but their content was so lewd that our YouTube channel was warned for posting explicit content!
You can see one of the ‘cleaner’ websites in the video below, and watch the simple steps on how to see the exploit: we simply tapped on the Facebook post’s link to the Google Form, and in the form the We See Through agency’s website address is shown: tapping on that opens our phone’s web browser, where the WST website is shown for a few seconds… before the compromised code takes over, and redirects us to one of the pool of what seems to be about a dozen different websites:
On looking at the website’s code, we see that there is a redirection after five seconds, and that all visits are tracked by a ‘Yandex’ tracker – meaning that a Russian tracking system has collected the IP addresses of visitors to the We See Through marketing agency’s website.
As the Facebook post advertising the focus groups does not reveal which political party is funding this research, we do not know who is paying for the data collection, and naturally, with insecure IT systems at We See Through – at least on their public-facing website, we do not know who else may have access to residents’ details.
We aim to find out, and report back – so will update this page after contacting We See Through, and each of the main political parties who may be operating in Hillingdon.
The local elections will be held on 7th May, where all 53 councillor seats are up for election, and control of our Council is at stake. The Conservatives lead Hillingdon Council at the moment, having 31 of 53 Councillors, but we understand that both Labour and Reform UK will be contesting every ward in the hope that they can win control.