By Apurva Venkat & Salman SH Zomato has confirmed that its database was compromised by hackers. In a blog post on Thursday, Zomato mentioned that its security team discovered a breach in its system wherein encrypted passwords and raw usernames/emails belonging to 17 million users were stolen by unidentified hackers. The company, however, claims that payment related data or credit card details have not been stolen or leaked since it is stored in an encrypted format. Note that Zomato says that "We hash passwords with a one-way hashing algorithm, with multiple hashing iterations and individual salt per password. This means your password cannot be easily converted back to plain text." To fix the breach, Zomato has reset passwords and logged out the affected users from the app and the website, and that even though the encrypted passwords cannot be decrypted, it had advised users to reset their passwords. “So far, it looks like an internal (human) security breach - some employee’s development account got compromised. A layer of authorisation will be added for internal teams having access to this data to avoid the possibility of any human breach,” Zomato added. The company said that it will be rolling specialised updates for "enhancing security measures for all user information stored within our database", but did not provide a timeline. Note that this isn't the first time that Zomato has come across security issues in its system. In 2015, Zomato was hacked by an Indian ethical hacker named Anand Prakash, who not only discovered a critical security…
Please subscribe to MediaNama. Don't share prints and PDFs.
You May Also Like
News
Google has released a Google Travel Trends Report which states that branded budget hotel search queries grew 179% year over year (YOY) in India, in...
Advert
135 job openings in over 60 companies are listed at our free Digital and Mobile Job Board: If you’re looking for a job, or...
News
By Aroon Deep and Aditya Chunduru You’re reading it here first: Twitter has complied with government requests to censor 52 tweets that mostly criticised...
News
Rajesh Kumar* doesn’t have many enemies in life. But, Uber, for which he drives a cab everyday, is starting to look like one, he...