If you have ever made any donation via crowd funding website Patreon, your personal details and donations details are supposedly published online. A recent hack on the website reportedly resulted in a huge data theft which include the names, addresses and donations made by the users. While, the hackers successfully invaded the website and accessed the passwords, the credit card details were not stolen thankfully.
The website Patreon works on a special algorithm called bycrypt which keep the passwords and other details encrypted. The website reportedly was in a debug mode, when attacked by the hackers. Around 15 gigabytes of data was compromised in this attack which included over 2.3 million unique email address.
The things gone worse when the stolen data started circulated on the internet and was reposted on various web portals by someone. As per a report submitted by Troy Hunt, a security researcher the data reposted in various online locations were coming from Pateron servers. Hunt also said in his report that the damage was actually more than that assumed by the Pateron officials.
As the hack attempt came into notice, Jack Conte, the Chief Executive of Patreon confirmed the news on official blog. Conte said, “”We do not store full credit card numbers on our servers and no credit card numbers were compromised”. He further added, “”Although accessed, all passwords, social security numbers and tax form information remain safely encrypted with a 2048-bit RSA key.”
Patreon, the crowdfunding website lets people make their donations on various projects. More than 16 million viewers used to visit the websites as per the stats reported by teamPatron.
