Adobe, the company behind Photoshop and Flash has been the victim of a hacker attack that resulted in the theft of 2.9 million users’ data. According to Adobe, this data includes ‘customer names, encrypted credit or debit card numbers, expiration dates, and other information relating to customer orders.’
This is quite a severe breach of Adobe’s security, and it is taking a number of measures to help affected users.
- If your data was stolen, Adobe will contact you and reset your password, with information about how you can change it.
- If your credit card details were stolen, you will be notified by email. Adobe is offering a free one year credit monitoring system to help ensure there are no bogus uses of your credit card details.
- Adobe has contacted the banks that process its payments, so they can help protect customer accounts.
As well as customer data, the company also suffered ‘illegal access to source code of numerous Adobe products’. Adobe doesn’t believe this poses any threat to users, but it’s not clear what the criminals intend to do with this source code. Hackers could use it to find security holes in Adobe’s products, but the company says it is ‘not aware of any zero-day exploits targeting any Adobe products.’
Attacks like this will never be stopped completely, but they highlight how important it is for users not to use the same password across different services, as if one is discovered, a hacker would have access the other accounts too.
[Source: Adobe]
