Today, popular anti-virus company MacKeeper is in news for being the victim of hackers. Hackers have exposed the database of 13 Million MacKeeper users. This database includes names, email addresses, usernames, password hashes, IP addresses, phone numbers, and system information of the users.
The data breach was discovered by Chris Vickery, a white hat hacker. He reported the vulnerability to company without any delay. Company has now patched the issue and published the advisory confirming the incident. He was able to download 13 Million customer records by entering a selection of IP addresses. Data was open and no username or password was asked to access the data.
MacKeeper confirmed that billing is being done by third-party companies and no billing data was ever stored on the server. So, customers should not need to worry.
It was 21 GB data openly available. Chris Vickery Shodan.io to find publicly available MangoDB instances. Although stored passwords were encrypted, but it seems they were using MD5 hashing which is now easy to crack. There are various MD5 cracking tools available which can generate plain passwords in few seconds.
Chris also posted the snapshot in a reddit post to confirm the hack.
Company promised to take care of security things in near future.
“We will continue to take every possible step to protect the data of our customers from the evolving cyber threats that companies both large and small face on a daily basis. The privacy and security of our clients’ information remains our top priority and from the moment we were aware of the access, we immediately took several proactive steps to identify and correct the issue,” Mackeeper posted in blog.
It is interesting to note that security companies itself not taking care of security. Their data is open to access and passwords are encrypted with weak encryption. At the end, is user who suffer.
