The world is not coming to end, but the world’s best loved crowd sourcing website has been compromised. The Kickstarter hack, perpetrated by unknown actors, compromised user data, but left credit card info untouched.
On Wednesday law enforcement officials contacted Kickstarter and four days later Kickstarter admitted the facts to users — ‘we wuz hacked!’ The company steadfastly maintains that only user data — usernames, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers and encrypted passwords — was compromised and that credit information remained secure.
Important Kickstarter Security Notice
Yancey Strickler · February 15 2014 ·On Wednesday night, law enforcement officials contacted Kickstarter and alerted us that hackers had sought and gained unauthorized access to some of our customers’ data. Upon learning this, we immediately closed the security breach and began strengthening security measures throughout the Kickstarter system.
No credit card data of any kind was accessed by hackers. There is no evidence of unauthorized activity of any kind on all but two Kickstarter user accounts.
While no credit card data was accessed, some information about our customers was. Accessed information included usernames, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, and encrypted passwords. Actual passwords were not revealed, however it is possible for a malicious person with enough computing power to guess and crack an encrypted password, particularly a weak or obvious one.
As a precaution, we strongly recommend that you create a new password for your Kickstarter account, and other accounts where you use this password.
To change your password, log in to your Kickstarter account and look for the banner at the top of the page to create a new, secure password. We recommend you do the same on other sites where you use this password. For additional help with password security, we recommend tools like 1Password and LastPass.
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. 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 is a vibrant community like no other, and we can’t thank you enough for being a part of it. Please let us know if you have any questions, comments, or concerns. You can reach us at accountsecurity@kickstarter.com.
PS: A technical note on Kickstarter’s passwords — older passwords were uniquely salted and digested with SHA-1 multiple times. More recent passwords are hashed with bcrypt.
Kickstarter Hack: A Dangerous World
Following the Kickstarter hack, the company is advising users to update their passwords. Needless to say, careful and diligent will also monitor their other online accounts, as well as their credit cards for unauthorized behavior.
Revelation of the Kickstarter hack comes just one day after $2.7 million Silk Road hack, which followed on the heels of the damaging Target hack that netted more than 70 million.
Is the (online) world going to hell in a hand basket or is this all just so much todo about little…
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Via The Verge, Source Kickstarter