Menéame, the popular platform in which registered members share news published on online portals, has suffered a hack that has caused the data leak of a small part of its users, as confirmed by the website itself through a statement. Specific, hackers reportedly extracted personal information, such as email addresses and passwords, from 41.5% of accountsalthough Menéame assures that many of these are bots or are inactive, and that the leak would actually affect 17% of users.
The hack, as described by the portal itself, began on September 14. The moderators of the platform noticed a “strange activity” that they categorized as an attempted attack. “We closed the URLs that it requested, and we did not give it more importance because apparently there was no access to data,” they say. Days later, on October 3, the Menéame team received a notice from a user, who alerted to have seen a URL of a forum in which the sale of the portal database was offered.
After an investigation, Menéame was able to verify that the attackers did not expressly access the database. However, they did access the private information of some users through “indirect” access.
Filtered the email and password of 41.5% of Menéame users
Menéame assures that the hack has only caused access to the email and the encrypted password of 41.5% of users. A figure that, according to the portal, is reduced to 17%. Well, they assure that many of the accounts to which the attacker or attackers have obtained access are inactive or are bots or accounts spam. “We have more than 660,000 registered users, but there are many inactive bots and emails,” they stress.
They also highlight that the attackers cannot directly access the users’ Menéame account, since password encryption prevents the password from being displayed as it is. Instead, a string of random characters is created in which, among these, the access code that the user has entered is hidden. In any case, and if you are a Menéame user, it is best to change your password and avoid entering it on other portals. You can also check if your mail has been compromised in a data leak.