Social media users at risk from Zendesk breach

Social-networkers beware, user information from three social media giants has been compromised as the result of a Zendesk hack.

Zendesk is a little known customer service company that is used by some of the internet’s biggest names. This company that mainly stays under the radar has gotten a lot of attention since the hack that affected users of Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest, first reported by Wired.

The Bay Area company announced the breach Thursday night in a blog post titled, “We’ve been hacked.”

“We’ve become aware that a hacker accessed our system this week. As soon as we learned of the attack, we patched the vulnerability and closed the access that the hacker had. Our ongoing investigation indicates that the hacker had access to the support information that three of our customers store on our system. We believe that the hacker downloaded email addresses of users who contacted those three customers for support, as well as support email subject lines. We notified our affected customers immediately and are working with them to assist in their response.”

Zendesk alerted users that a hacker accessed email addresses of users, as well as email subject lines, of customer support requests. Phone numbers also may have been compromised, but since no passwords were revealed, none of the social media networks have reported user accounts compromised.

Specific companies were not publically identified, but users began receiving warnings the night of the breach. Tumblr notified affected users first, with Twitter and Pinterest to follow.

Zendesk is an outsourced customer service provider who just signed up their 25,000th customer since their 2007 foundations.

The hack is in light of other high profile hacks such as Facebook, Apple and Microsoft.

Hacking is unfortunately an increasing problem that companies of any size face. Ensure your data is protected by finding the right information security professionals through Tiro Security. Contact us to find out about our Executive Search options.

 

Posted in