Kickstarter and Forbes have been the victim of hacks resulting in the theft of account data. Users of either service are advised to change passwords, and make sure they are not using the same password on other services too. It’s not known who hacked Kickstarter, but Forbes was the victim of an attack by the notorious Syrian Electronic Army (SEA).
Kickstarter lost usernames, email addresses, phone numbers and encrypted passwords, but the data did not include credit card details. The SEA posted a fake story on Forbes, and the site says some user data may have been exposed. The SEA threatened to publish a database of all Forbes users, but later said it would not do so, although Forbes ‘deserved to be embarrassed.’
#Forbes users table(1,071,963 user-email-password) was dumped successfully, Anyone want to buy it? pic.twitter.com/QniuVosvcM
— SyrianElectronicArmy (@Official_SEA16) February 14, 2014
In an official statement, Kickstarter said it has tightened its security in response to the hack, and apologized to its users. Both attacks are a reminder of the importance of using different passwords across different services, to minimize the damage from any theft of this kind. If you use the same password for different accounts, anyone who hacks one account would be able to access any others they could find.
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[Sources: Kickstarter, Twitter]