Zomato says 17 mn user records hacked

Zomato, the leading online restaurant, guide yesterday said that around 17 million user records from its database were hacked.  The stolen database included user email addresses and hashed passwords.

"The hashed password cannot be converted / decrypted back to plain text - so the sanctity of your password is intact in case you use the same password for other services. But if you are paranoid about security like us, we encourage you to change your password for any other services where you are using the same password," the company explained on its official blog.

According to a report in Hackread,  a dark web vendor going by the handle "nclay" had claimed to hack Zomato. The stolen data was being sold at a popular Dark Web marketplace. According to the report,  the price of the entire stolen data was worth 0.5587 bitcoins that is equivalent to Rs65,418.98.

Meanwhile, on its blogpost, Zomato assured that the payment related information was stored separately and secured by a top-notch security standard vault. " 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."

Zomato has assured that it had reset the passwords for all the stolen accounts and also logged out all these users of the app and website.

''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."

Meanwhile, the company said it will upgrade the security measures for all user information stored within our database and also add a layer of authorisation for internal teams that access the data to avoid the possibility of any human breach.

According to commentators, this was not the first time Zomato accounts had been compromised. The company also encountered a hacking attack in 2015 when its 62.5 million users data was stolen.