Nearly 17 million Zomato usernames and hashed passwords have been stolen by hackers., the company suspects it is an insider’s job. Nearly 17 million Zomato usernames and hashed passwords have been stolen by hackers. Zomato is the Indian largest online restaurant guide, the company confirmed data breach announcing that hackers have stolen accounts details of millions of its users. “about 17 million user records from our database were stolen. The stolen information has user email addresses and hashed passwords.” reads the data breach notification issued by the company. The company tried to downplay the incident explaining that hashed password are hard to decrypt. “We hash passwords with a one-way hashing algorithm, with multiple hashing iterations and individual salt per password. This means your password cannot be easily converted back to plain text. We however, strongly advise you to change your password for any other services where you are using the same password.” continues the statement The reality is quite different, hackers could easily obtain computational resources to crack the passwords.

Zomato confirmed that hackers did not access financial information of the users that are stored in a separate database that was not involved in the attack.

“Payment related information on Zomato is stored separately from this (stolen) data in a highly secure PCI Data Security Standard (DSS) compliant vault. No payment information or credit card data has been stolen/leaked,” the company claims.

The company suspects that the hack is an insider’s job.

“Our team is actively scanning all possible breach vectors and closing any gaps in our environment. So far, it looks like an internal (human) security breach – some employee’s development account got compromised,” the company said.

According to the HackRead website, data stolen by the hackers are already offered for sale on a darkweb marketplace, the vendor “nclay” is offering the full dump for BTC 0.5587 (USD 1,001.43).

Zomato Customers should change their password and stay vigilant on suspicious email, crooks could exploit stolen data to launch a phishing campaign.

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Zomato data breach, cybercrime)

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