Report: Kickstarter.com user data breached

New York – Social fundraising platform Kickstarter.com suffered a data breach that exposed personal data of some users to hackers. On a corporate blog post, Kickstarter CEO Yancey Strickler said that on Wednesday, Feb. 12, law enforcement notified the company that hackers had sought and gained unauthorized access to some of its customers' data.



Upon learning this, Kickstarter immediately closed the security breach and began strengthening security measures throughout the Kickstarter system. According to Strickler’s blog post, no credit card was accessed, although usernames, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, and encrypted passwords were breached. While no actual passwords were revealed, it is possible for hackers to guess and crack an encrypted password.



Kickstarter said there is only evidence of unauthorized activity of any kind on two Kickstarter user accounts. The company has reached out to those two users and secured their accounts, but advises customers to change their Kickstarter passwords and any other accounts where they have used those passwords.



“We set a very high bar for how we serve our community, and this incident is frustrating and upsetting,” Strickler said in his post. “We have since improved our security procedures and systems in numerous ways, and we will continue to do so in the weeks and months to come. We are working closely with law enforcement, and we are doing everything in our power to prevent this from happening again.”