Disqus confirms it’s been hacked and more than 17.5 Million Users Details Exposed

Disqus the most famous commenting system late today confirmed the data breach that took place in the summer of 2012, which exposed more than 17.5 million user accounts online.

Leaked details include email addresses, Disqus usernames, sign-up dates, and last login dates in plain text for 17.5mm users, but passwords are hashed with SHA-1 and salted, which protects the compromised account.

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This breach was identified by the Aussie security researcher Troy Hunt, and according to Hunt’s tweet, Disqus took 23 hours and 42 minutes from initial private disclosure to public notification.

User Impact

Email address is in plain text, so affected users may receive Spam emails. They believe the data was not widely exposed and they also confirmed the exposed data is from July 2012.

Right now there isn’t any evidence of unauthorized logins occurring in relation to this. No plain text passwords were exposed, but it is possible for this data to be decrypted (even if unlikely). As a security precaution, we have reset the passwords for all affected users. We recommend that all users change passwords on other services if they are shared.Disqus says.

So if you started using Disqus after July 2012, then your account is not impacted by the breach.

Safety Measures were taken by Disqus

They started notifying users about the breach and forcing the reset of passwords for all affected users.Also, they tighten the database security.

They also said that toward the end of 2012 we changed our password hashing algorithm from SHA1 to bcrypt.

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