[BreachExchange] After breach, Stack Overflow says some user data exposed

[Destry Winant]

https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/17/stack-overflow-user-data-exposed/

After disclosing a breach earlier this week, Stack Overflow has
confirmed some user data was accessed.

In case you missed it, the developer knowledge sharing site confirmed
Thursday a breach of its systems last weekend, resulting in
unauthorized access to production systems — the front-facing servers
that actively power the site. The company gave few details, except
that customer data was unaffected by the breach.

Now the company said the intrusion on the website began about a week
earlier and “a very small number” of users had some data exposed.

“The intrusion originated on May 5 when a build deployed to the
development tier for stackoverflow.com contained a bug, which allowed
an attacker to log in to our development tier as well as escalate
their access on the production version of stackoverflow.com,” said
Mary Ferguson, vice president of engineering.

“This change was quickly identified and we revoked their access
network-wide, began investigating the intrusion, and began taking
steps to remediate the intrusion,” she said.

Although the user database wasn’t compromised, “we have identified
privileged web requests that the attacker made that could have
returned IP address, names, or emails” for some users.

The company didn’t immediately quantify how many users were affected.
Stack Overflow has 10 million registered users. Spokesperson Khalid El
Khatib said “approximately 250 public network users” were affected.
Ferguson said affected users will be notified.

Stack Overflow’s teams, business and enterprise customers are on
separate, unaffected infrastructure, she said, and there’s “no
evidence” that those systems were accessed. The company’s advertising
and talent business is said to be unaffected.

In response to the incident, the company terminated the unauthorized
access and is conducting an “extensive” audit of its logs to gauge the
level of access gained by the attacker.