LivingSocial announced Friday noon that a massive cyber-attack that compromised 50 million customers' personal details occurred and that the company is working with the authorities to investigate the intrusion, says a report from AllThingsD.
LivingSocial, a daily deal site, sent out an email to all its employees notifying them about a cyber-attack that compromised 50 million of its customers' personal details including names, date of birth for some customers, email addresses and passwords, but the company assured that the customer's credit card information and transactional related information was not hacked. LivingSocial is currently working with the authorities in order to find the source of the hack. In the mean time, the company is contacting affected customers around the world requesting them to change their passwords and ignore any e-mail claiming to be from LivingSocial asking for personal account information.
AllThingsD had a chance to get a copy of the email sent to all employees and the email which will be sent to all customers in light of the incident. The email sent from company's CEO Tim O'Shaughnessy said that the hackers got "unauthorized access to some customer data from our servers."
In an effort to regain the security of all the customer's accounts, LivingSocial said in an email that will be sent to all customers, that it will be expiring the existing password and requested all users to change it to a new one. It advised all customers to change the password through LivingSocial official web page.
In doubling efforts to avoid customers from being misguided into false phishing emails, the advisory email said: "Please note that LivingSocial will never ask you directly for personal or account information in an email. We will always direct you to the LivingSocial website - and require you to login - before making any changes to your account. Please disregard any emails claiming to be from LivingSocial that request such information or direct you to a different website that asks for such information."
Many customers of LivingSocial showed concern about the safety of their personal information. WSOCTV reported some customers who were not very happy about the whole issue.
"50 million people? That's a lot of people. Hope I'm not one of them," said customer Feliz Napoli.
"I know I'd be really upset. I had my card stolen before and it's devastating, so I know how hard it is to know that info may out there," said another customer Shanna Craig.
"It's kind of a shame, because people are trying to save money in this economy, but you probably need to choose what you belong to. Choose your friends wisely," said customer Lauralee Zimmerly.
In a recent trend of hackers taking control of several high-profile companies also includes Zappos, where 24 million customers' confidential details in January last year. In a similar incident LinkedIn users were advised to change their passwords following a breach, June last year. Recently in late February, Evernote was targeted for a similar cyber-attack where user information including usernames, email addresses and encrypted passwords was compromised.
