First came target. Then came Neiman Marcus. And today, it’s my unfortunate duty to report yet another major hacking.
This time it was Kickstarter. Kickstarter is a website where struggling artists can form alliances, get funding for their work, and maybe even be discovered by a major label or company. By summer 2013, they hosted over 100,000 projects submitted by artists and raised over $700 million in pledges. But last week, their defenses were broken into. Users’ usernames, emails, physical addresses, phone numbers and passwords were compromised. Fortunately, no credit card or financial data was compromised, as far as we know. Kickstarter quickly revamped it’s security system and vows they’ve learned and improved. But they’re being hush about how many people were affected.
Like I said, the good news is the hackers got no financial info this time. But the info they got could easily lead to ID theft. It can also lead to more sinister problems: What if someone uses the personal info stolen to settle scores, or to sabotage someone’s artistic ability and dream? If you’re using Kickstarter, change your password immediately! I’ll go even further: if you’re using the same passwords for other websites, change those too. Kudos to Kickstarter for catching and reporting this breach before it got anymore severe. But this is the third major breach in as many months that we’ve heard about. Is there anywhere that’s safe?