Kickstarter Hacked

The popular crowd-funding platform Kickstarter, has had a serious security breach and the recommendation is to change your password on the website.  Also, their advice is to change your passwords that you use on any other websites, if you used the same password.

Although the site was hacked, there is some good news in that no credit card data was accessed and actual passwords were not revealed. Unfortunately, the bad news is that usernames, email addresses, telephone numbers, and encrypted passwords have been accessed.  The most worrying of all of this information is that, the encrypted passwords may be cracked given enough computing power.

If you navigate to the Kickstarter main webpage and log into your account and there will be a banner that you are able to click onto to change the password.  Below is the security notice from the CEO at Kickstarter, Yancey Strickler, which advises you on all the ins and outs of all the issues involved:

Important Security Notice from Yancey Strickler CEO Kickstarter dated 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 [email protected].

Thank you.

So there you have it folks! If you have any account info with Kickstarter may I suggest you head over there as soon as you are able and change your password!  As always, if you have any sensible comments regarding this story, please leave your comments in the section below.

[Image via mashable]

SOURCE: http://lifehacker.com/kickstarter-hacked-change-your-passwords-now-1523629572