LivingSocial Hacked – 50 Million Accounts Compromised

By Cynthia Herbert :: 7:24 PM

Daily deals website LivingSocial has reported that it was the victim of a hacker attack, and customer data and passwords were compromised for about 50 million users of the service.

Earlier today, the company began sending e-mails to subscribers who may have had their data accessed by the hackers. Customers were notified that they would need to log into the system and change their passwords.

“We recently experienced a cyber-attack on our computer systems that resulted in unauthorized access to some customer data from our servers,” said LivingSocial’s CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy in an e-mail. “We are actively working with law enforcement to investigate this issue.”

Hackers were not able to gain access to LivingSocial’s database of customer credit card numbers, but they did manage to get a hold of encrypted user passwords for the site. Customers who used the same password on LivingSocial as on other sites have been encouraged to change the password everywhere they use it.

“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,” O’Shaughnessy e-mail explained. The stolen passwords were not in plain text format, they were encrypted, so it would be difficult, but not impossible, for the hackers to decode the full plain text passwords.

LivingSocial will be turning its customer service telephone lines off at this time, and will only handle customer service issues via the web-based service center.