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Hackers Steal Wealth Of User Data In Crowdfunding Website Attack
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The crowd funding website Kickstarter said this weekend that hackers had broken into the company’s website.
According to the crowdfunding site’s blog, law enforcement officials alerted Kickstarter of the Web intrusion first, saying hackers gained unauthorized access to customer data.
“Upon learning this, we immediately closed the security breach and began strengthening security measures throughout the Kickstarter system,” the company wrote in the blog post. “While no credit card data was accessed, some information about our customers was.”
Hackers stole customer usernames, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers and passwords. Although the passwords were encrypted, hackers could use a program to crack the encryption and potentially log into a customers’ account that uses the same password and email.
“We’re incredibly sorry that this happened. We set a very high bar for how we serve our community, and this incident is frustrating and upsetting,” Kickstarter said.
The company is asking customers to change their passwords by logging into their account on the site and create a new one. Kickstarter is also recommending customers go ahead and change passwords on other sites if they use the same password.
“We have since improved our security procedures and systems in numerous ways, and we will continue to do so in the weeks and months to come. We are working closely with law enforcement, and we are doing everything in our power to prevent this from happening again,” Kickstarter said.
The crowdfunding site continued to stress on its blog post that customer credit card information was not stolen, adding that Kickstarter does not store full credit card numbers on its site. Kickstarter has seen 5.6 million people pledge to the funding of 56,000 projects since it first launched in 2009.
The hackers responsible for the Kickstarter attack have yet to be identified, however it is just the latest in a string of attacks by hackers over the last few months. In December hackers attacked Snapchat, Yahoo, Target and Neiman Marcus.
Over the weekend the Syrian Electronic Army said it published user data from Forbes after breaking into the news site. Forbes acknowledged the attacks on its Facebook page and Twitter, saying that it was the target of a digital attack and its website was compromised. As of Monday morning Forbes’ blog page continued to be down.
Source: http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/1113072870/kickstarter-hacked-data-stolen-021714/
