LivingSocial cyber attack affects millions of customers, including Malaysia

SAN FRANCISCO: LivingSocial, the second-largest daily deal company behind Groupon Inc, said on Friday it was hit by a cyber attack that may have affected more than 50 million customers.
The
attack hit customers in the United States, Canada, the U.K., Ireland,
Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Southern Europe and Latin America.
The
company said the attack on its computer systems resulted in
unauthorized access to customer data, including names, email addresses,
date of birth for some users and "encrypted" passwords.
LivingSocial
stressed customer credit card and merchants' financial and banking
information were not affected or accessed. It also does not store
passwords in plain text.
"We are actively working with law enforcement to investigate this issue," the company, part-owned by Amazon.com Inc, wrote in an email to employees.
LivingSocial
does not disclose how many customers it has. However, spokesman Andrew
Weinstein said "a substantial portion" of the company's customer base
was affected. LivingSocial is also contacting customers who closed
accounts, because it still has their information stored in databases, he
added.
The attack hit customers in the United States, Canada,
the U.K., Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Southern Europe and
Latin America. Customers in South Korea, Indonesia, Philippines and
Thailand were not affected, Weinstein said.
"In light of recent
successful widespread attacks against major social networking sites,
it's obvious that these providers are simply not doing enough to protect
their customers' information," said George Tubin, senior security
strategist at Trusteer, a computer security company.
The attack
comes as LivingSocial struggles to handle a decline in consumer and
merchant demand for daily deals. The company raised $110 million from
investors, including Amazon earlier this year, but was forced to make
large concessions to get the new money.
Amazon invested $56
million in LivingSocial in the first quarter, according to a regulatory
filing on Friday, which also revealed the company had a first-quarter
operating loss of $44 million on revenue of $135 million.
LivingSocial
said on Friday it was beginning to contact more than 50 million
customers whose data may have been affected by the cyber attack.
LivingSocial told customers in an email that they should log on to LivingSocial.com to create a new password for their accounts.
"We
also encourage you, for your own personal data security, to consider
changing password(s) on any other sites on which you use the same or
similar password(s)," LivingSocial Chief Executive Tim O'Shaughnessy wrote in the email.
"We are sorry this incident occurred."
All Things D reported the cyber attack earlier on Friday. - Reuters