The startup technologies appear to be the new target of hackers. Slack, the text messaging start-up today disclosed that it had been hacked by hackers. The company was hacked for four days in February exposing the central database to malicious hackers. The central database of the company includes the user names and email addresses of the users.
Slack was Hacked
As per the official blog post made by Slack team, the database containing team message history and the payment information were not exposed in the hack. The company also claims that the malicious attack has affected a very small number of Slack account.
Anne Toth from Slack says, “Slack maintains a central user database which includes user names, email addresses, and one-way encrypted (‘hashed’) passwords. In addition, this database contains information that users may have optionally added to their profiles, such as phone number and Skype ID.
However, the good news is that the company patched the security holes and tautened the security by adding a two-factor authentication. The company also added a new feature Password Kill Switch which allows the password resetting and forced log out for all users in team messaging.
According to Slack, the features were already available in the messaging app but are moved up seeing the breach. Team Slack is rebuilding and testing each of their security components in their system and strongly suggest users to enable the Two-factor Authentication and Password Kill Switch security feature.
You can set up the two-factor authentication on your team site and the Password Kill Switch feature is available under the authentication tab of your team settings.
Check out the official Slack blog for the further instructions on enabling these security features.