One of the most visited sites on the internet has been hacked. According to a ZD Net story, millions of accounts associated with video sharing site Dailymotion have been stolen; 85.2 million, to be precise.
“A hacker extracted 85.2 million unique email addresses and usernames from the company’s systems, but about one-in-five accounts — roughly 18.3 million— had associated passwords, which were scrambled with the bcrypt hashing function, making the passwords difficult to crack,” according to the story, posted on Dec. 5, 2016.
Alexa rankings put Dailymotion as the 113th most visited site in the world.
Breach notification service LeakedSource obtained the data and on Dec. 6, the site published a blog post that admitted to the breach (the website is based in France and the post was originally in French, which accounts for the funky translation):
“We learned that following an external security problem Dailymotion, the passwords of a number of accounts may have been compromised. The hack appears to be limited and would concern any personal data.
“The security of your account is very important to us and we take all necessary steps to identify any shortcomings and addressed. Therefore, as a precaution, we urge all our partners and users to reset now their passwords.”
In this WIRED story about the hack, Javvad Malik, security advocate at AlienVault is quoted as saying: “While it is too early to establish the why or how, of what happened, the attack against Dailymotion serves as a reminder that a company doesn’t need to hold financial information or any other form of overtly valuable data to be a target. Attackers will go after a company, particularly ones with large user bases for a variety of reasons.”
Users who are concerned their data was part of the hack can check LeakedSource’s database to see if their details are included.
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