Imgur Just Learns about a 2014 Hack into its User Accounts

The widely visited picture sharing website Imgur disclosed on November 26, 2017 that certain data hack struck it during 2014 which it came to know from a source as late as 23rd November this year. Imgur posted on its blog that hackers captured 1.7m user accounts' passwords and e-mail addresses the number of accounts being from its huge 150m total accounts. Imgur, which never collected people's phone numbers, addresses, or in addition their real names, did not have any risk of personal information becoming compromised.

The source notifying Imgur is a security researcher as ZDNet identified so, having the moniker Troy Hunt, and operating certain service of notifying data breaches, the service named "Have I Been Pwned." Cnet.com posted this on the Web dated November 26, 2017.

While investigation is ongoing into the hack, Imgur believes the hack took advantage of a password encryption mode which it employed at some earlier time and that one enabled hackers to infiltrate based on brute force assault. The website unit made its algorithm up to date in 2016.

The popular online site where users share photographs did not know about the data hack till Troy Hunt received the stolen material from the hackers. Hunt then informed Imgur regarding the hack and Imgur, which operates from San Francisco, began creating the passwords anew that belonged to the affected accounts. Along with that the company released one public discourse that was an alert to the website users that their credentials were potentially hacked.

Hunt was rejoiced at Imgur's prompt action which he told the website company after his notification to it on Thanksgiving Day. Hunt said he already had 60% of e-mail ids within its service's database. Incidentally, his "Have I Been Pawned" database consists of over 4.8bn records. The security researcher praised Imgur because it responded to the notification fast.

Imgur isn't alone to be breached among image hosting websites and possibly other similar sites too may get hacked in future. For, in 2015, its competitor Photobucket.com Inc. suffered hackers' attack while Flickr, in 2014, had its A/Cs hijacked within the wider Yahoo breaches.

» SPAMfighter News - 11/30/2017