It’s not uncommon for online services to get infiltrated which results in the username and passwords of countless users being compromised. That is precisely what has happened with Flipboard. The news aggregator has confirmed that some of its databases were accessed by an unauthorized copy which resulted in usernames and passwords of its users being compromised.
Flipboard confirmed that the unauthorized party was able to access some of its databases multiple times and that they “potentially obtained copies” of the user information in those databases. The unauthorized access took place between June, 2018 through March, 2019 in addition to between April 21-22, 2019.
The company does confirm that not all users have been affected by this security breach. However, out of an abundance of caution, it has decided to mandate password resets for all of its 145 million accounts. Users who log into their accounts next time will be required to change their password.
The databases which were breached included usernames, passwords, and email addresses. Fortunately, Flipboard wasn’t storing the passwords in plain text format, as they were kept hashed. The company says that the investigation into this breach is ongoing and it hasn’t put a firm number on the total accounts affected by the security incident.