Around 14 million customers impacted by Hostinger data breach

Hostinger International Ltd., the famous web hosting provider as well as Internet domain registrar, has suffered from a data breach when an unauthorized third-party has gained access to their internal API server. The company became aware about this incident on Aug. 23, 2019, after they received informational alerts about one of their internal servers getting accessed by unauthorized third-party.

In a blogpost, Hostinger said that "this server contained an authorization token, which was used to obtain further access and escalate privileges to our system RESTful API Server. This API Server is used to query the details about our clients and their accounts".

This compromised server contains client information of around 14 million Hostinger users. Thus, the company assumed that the breached most probably have impacted all the 14 million users. The client information that was exposed contains the clients' first names, email addresses, usernames, hashed passwords, as well as IP addresses. However, payment card data or financial information has not been accessed or compromised, as Hostinger doesn't store the payment card data on their servers. Payments for the Hostinger services were made through certified and authorized third-party payment providers.

The Hostinger client accounts as well as stored data on those client accounts also have not been impacted by this incident. In a blog, Hostinger said that "we completed a thorough internal investigation. Hostinger Client accounts and data stored on those accounts (websites, domains, hosted emails, etc.) remained untouched and unaffected".

Upon learning about this incident, an internal as well as external forensics expert team along with the data scientist's team was hired by Hostinger to investigate this incident and determine origin of this attack.

Once origin of the unauthorized access was identified, Hostinger took necessary measures so as to protect their client data. The company has disabled the access to that server by securing API and all the related systems. Although passwords were hashed, the company said that it has reset the passwords for all of their clients as well as systems within their infrastructure. In addition, they have informed the customers about the incident through email notifications that include the password reset links.

Besides, the company has taken steps so as to improve security measures of all the Hostinger operations.

» SPAMfighter News - 9/11/2019