Daily deals site LivingSocial has become the latest high-profile site to fall victim to hackers, after an attack accessed information for 50 million accounts last week. Names, email addresses, dates of birth and encrypted passwords were accessed in the attack.
The company has not explained how hackers were able to penetrate its systems. Customers in every country bar Thailand, Korea, Indonesia and the Philippines have been affected.
The company’s CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy said in an email to customers, “We recently experienced a cyber attack on our computer systems that resulted in unauthorized access to some customer data from our servers. We are actively working with law enforcement to investigate this issue.”
"The information accessed includes names, email addresses, date of birth for some users, and encrypted passwords - technically 'hashed' and 'salted' passwords," said O'Shaughnessy. Customer credit card information and merchant’s financial information was not accessed or affected, the company said, as reported by All Things Digital.
“To ensure our customers and merchants are fully informed and protected, we are notifying those who may have been impacted via email explaining what happened, expiring their passwords, and requesting that they create new passwords,” said the company.
LivingSocial is part-owned by Amazon. The attack is the latest in a string of such incidents, with LinkedIn, Zappos and Evernote also having seen large amounts of customer data accessed or compromised in recent months.
