Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

Jewish Business News

Business

MyHeritage site was hacked, 92 million mail details were stolen

Gilad Yefet founder MyHeritage photo Shaul Golan

 

MyHeritage site, the genealogy, and DNA testing service hacked and 92 million user mail addresses and passwords were stolen and found on a private server, according to a blog post reporting by information security chief, Omer Deutsch.

According to the post, the breakthrough was discovered after an independent investigator turned to the company and revealed a cache of addresses that their examination revealed to be part of the site.

Please help us out :
Will you offer us a hand? Every gift, regardless of size, fuels our future.
Your critical contribution enables us to maintain our independence from shareholders or wealthy owners, allowing us to keep up reporting without bias. It means we can continue to make Jewish Business News available to everyone.
You can support us for as little as $1 via PayPal at office@jewishbusinessnews.com.
Thank you.

According to the company’s report, the inventory included details of users who registered to the site until October 2017 which is the date of the breach.

The email addresses and passwords used to connect to accounts. MyHeritage doesn’t store user passwords. Instead, it uses a one-way hash of each password, in which the hash key differs for each customer. This means that anyone gaining access to the hashed passwords does not have the actual passwords.

For the people whose email addresses were stored on the private server, the impact should be minimal, MyHeritage said.

It is not clear at this stage whether the stockpile was distributed among cybercriminals, as is usual in these cases – or that it was caught early on.

The company added no other data was found on the private server, and there’s no evidence the information was ever used by the perpetrators. Other sensitive data, including family trees and DNA data, are stored on segregate systems that are separate from those that house email addresses. These systems have added security, MyHeritage said, adding that it has no reason to believe they were compromised.

The company explains that it is not known who was behind the hacking and how the hacker managed to access the information.

MyHeritage was founded in 2003 by Gilad Yefet and used for genealogical research and root search. The site is considered one of the largest in the world.

Newsletter



Advertisement

You May Also Like

World News

In the 15th Nov 2015 edition of Israel’s good news, the highlights include:   ·         A new Israeli treatment brings hope to relapsed leukemia...

Entertainment

The Movie The Professional is what made Natalie Portman a Lolita.

Travel

After two decades without a rating system in Israel, at the end of 2012 an international tender for hotel rating was published.  Invited to place bids...

VC, Investments

You may not become a millionaire, but there is a lot to learn from George Soros.