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The admins at reddit should have known this – perhaps now they got the memo. While 2FA isn’t a bad idea in many situations, it’s certainly no security silver bullet – as we’ve known for years. This situation also illustrates the vulnerabilities of two-factor authentication, as they revealed in their announcement:Īlready having our primary access points for code and infrastructure behind strong authentication requiring two factor authentication (2FA), we learned that SMS-based authentication is not nearly as secure as we would hope, and the main attack was via SMS intercept.
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If reddit discovered this hack all the way back in June, why did they wait until August to alert their users? The digests connect a username to the associated email address and contain suggested posts from select popular and safe-for-work subreddits you subscribe to. The logs contain the digest emails themselves - they look like this. What was accessed:Logs containing the email digests we sent between June 3 and June 17, 2018. In Reddit’s first years it had many fewer features, so the most significant data contained in this backup are account credentials (username + salted hashedpasswords), email addresses, and all content (mostly public, but also private messages) from way back then.Įmail digests sent by Reddit in June 2018 What was accessed: A complete copy of an old database backup containing very early Reddit user data - from the site’s launch in 2005 through May 2007. While it’s difficult to determine exactly how many people are affected – mainly because Reddit is not revealing much information – they did publicly acknowledge a “serious” data breach that gives third parties direct access to sensitive user data:Īll Reddit data from 2007 and before including account credentials and email addresses Reddit – the popular forum owned by the Condé Nast (Advanced Publications) media empire – was recently in the news for a data breach that exposed private user information.
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