Flipboard hit with data breach, millions of passwords reset

Social Network aggregator Flipboard has disclosed that hackers broke into its servers over a period of 9 months and may have stolen millions of passwords. The site has reset all user passwords as a precaution.

Flipboard is a popular tool among social media enthusiasts, with 150 million monthly active users using the service to curate their social feeds and gather news and updates into a magazine style format. The site retained both login details for users and personal information, in addition to access tokens to users' social media feeds to allow the service to function.

In an announcement yesterday, Flipboard confirmed the details of a serious data breach involving its user database. The site was hacked multiple times between June 2nd 2018 and March 23rd 2019, and then was breached again from April 21st to April 22nd 2019. The intrusions were detected the day after the most recent hacks on April 23rd, and proactive steps have now been taken to safeguard users.

Data stolen included usernames, encrypted passwords, email addresses, and access tokens for people's social media feeds for an unknown number of users. The access tokens may have allowed the hackers to access data from people's social feeds, but wouldn't allow them to log into your accounts or make changes.

The passwords stolen were encrypted and would be difficult for hackers to read if you used a unique and sufficiently complex password for the service. Passwords entered or changed by users after March 14th 2012 have been encrypted using a strong method, but anyone who signed up before this date and didn't change their password after it may be at risk as those passwords were stored as weaker SHA-1 hashes.

Source: TechCrunch