With the tagline, “giving you the best of the internet in one place,” Reddit is a popular website designed for discussion, news aggregation, and the creation of social content. Boasting over 330 million users, the platform is characterized by an engaged community. Which also means it contains treasure troves of consumer data. Unfortunately, there’s now a chance that information has been exposed, as Reddit announced today that its systems were hacked at some point earlier this summer.
Announcing the breach on its r/announcements section, Reddit informed users that its internal systems were accessed by attackers sometime between June 14 to June 18. The cybercriminals managed to bypass the SMS-based two-factor authentication the company had in place to access user data. This information includes some current email addresses and a 2007 database backup containing old salted and hashed passwords (meaning, passwords that haven’t been stored in plaintext). Additionally, email digests sent in June 2018 were also accessed by the hackers as well.
Now, the amount the impacted emails and passwords is not yet exactly known, but it’s crucial Reddit users (particularly those who joined by 2007) start taking steps now to secure their personal security.
