Reddit has just announced on August 1 that it was hacked sometime between June 14 and June 18, 2018.

The hack has resulted in the potential exposure of users’ email addresses and passwords on the Internet.

Here’s everything you need to know and what to do to ensure that your Reddit passwords and emails are secure.

Reddit has suggested users take several steps to ensure their emails and passwords are safe

In a new post on the site’s r/announcements section, the company stated: ‘A hacker broke into a few of Reddit’s systems and managed to access some user data, including some current email addresses and a 2007 database backup containing old salted and hashed passwords.

'Since then we’ve been conducting a painstaking investigation to figure out just what was accessed, and to improve our systems and processes to prevent this from happening again.’

In a sophisticated attack, the hacker was reportedly able to bypass the company’s SMS authentication system, which is typically used to prevent such hacks. Reddit admitted that its SMS authentication system ‘… is not nearly as secure as we would hope, and the main attack was via SMS intercept.’

The company also stated: ‘Although this was a serious attack, the attacker did not gain write access to Reddit systems; they gained read-only access to some systems that contained backup data, source code and other logs.

'They were not able to alter Reddit information, and we have taken steps since the event to further lock down and rotate all production secrets and API keys, and to enhance our logging and monitoring systems.

‘Now that we've concluded our investigation sufficiently to understand the impact, we want to share what we know, how it may impact you, and what we've done to protect us and you from this kind of attack in the future.’

Overall, the hacker was successfully able to penetrate the website’s security infrastructure and accessed early user data dating to 2007 and prior. In addition to the email addresses, user names and passwords accessed, email digests sent during June 2018 were also believed to have been accessed by the hacker.

Reddit hack shows even strong security measures can be bypassed. https://t.co/WKDykbzbJE — CNBC (@CNBC) August 1, 2018

What Reddit users should do

Reddit users should take the following steps in the wake of the data breach: