Online image sharing community Imgur notified users of a potential data breach which occurred in 2014 which affected 1.7 million accounts. Imgur said that email addresses and passwords might have been compromised. The company said that it got an email on November 23 by a security researcher and said that he had data that included information of Imgur users.
“Our Chief Operating Officer received the email late night on November 23rd and immediately corresponded with the researcher to learn more about the potential breach. He simultaneously notified Imgur’s Founder/CEO and Vice President of Engineering. Our Vice President of Engineering then arranged to securely receive the data from the researcher and began working to validate that the data belonged to Imgur users,” Imgur said in the blog post.
Imgur said that it began notifying users on November 24 via email urging them to update their passwords. The company added that no other personally identifiable information was compromised. “The compromised account information included only email addresses and passwords,” it added.
The company said that it is still investigating how the security breach occurred, Imgur said that its database may have been cracked with brute force due to an older hashing algorithm.
Security breaches have been increasing at an increased rate in recent times.
- Earlier this month, Uber reported a security breach which occurred in November 2016 which affected more than 57 million drivers and riders. Personal information such as names, email addresses, and phone numbers were compromised.
- In September, Instagram reported a security breach to users and said that people’s email address and phone number could be accessed via a bug.
- In October, Yahoo reported that all 3 billion user accounts had been breached during the August 2013 data theft, which is three times the initial 1 billion affected accounts figure the company had reported.
- Meanwhile in the US and UK, American credit rating agency Equifax disclosed that it had several security breaches which affected more than 143 million users and Social Security Numbers (SSNs) of American citizens, driving license numbers, and a couple hundred thousand credit card numbers, among other documents were compromised. Subsequently, it came to light that personal and financial data of around 400,000 Britons and unspecified data of about 100,000 Canadians had also been part of the leak.
- Closer home in India, more than 3.2 million debit card details may have been stolen by hackers from ATMs and POS machines on YES Bank’s network in October last year.
