Amazon-owned daily deals site LivingSocial has been hacked, with hackers gaining access to the private details of potentially more than 50m people, including their names, email addresses, birth dates and passwords. LivingSocial is asking all users of the service to reset their passwords.
While private details of users were accessed there is no indication that the hackers succeeded in gaining credit card information.
“LivingSocial recently experienced a cyberattack on our computer systems that resulted in unauthorised access to some customer data from our server,” the company said on its website.
“We are actively working with law enforcement to investigate this issue.
“The information accessed includes names, email addresses, date of birth for some users, and encrypted passwords — technically ‘hashed’ and ‘salted’ passwords. We never store passwords in plain text. Although your LivingSocial password would be difficult to decode, we want to take every precaution to ensure that your account is secure, so we are expiring your old password and requesting that you create a new one,” the company said.
Washington, DC-headquartered LivingSocial has more than 50m customers in 21 countries. The deals it offers each day carry discounts of up to 50pc.
The service is very popular in Ireland and in October the company launched a section of its site dealing in physical goods.
