[BreachExchange] Disqus confirms 2012 hack of its comments tool

[Richard Forno]

Disqus confirms 2012 hack of its comments tool

The company is sending out password reset emails to users whose passwords were exposed.

By Zack Whittaker for Zero Day | October 6, 2017 -- 23:05 GMT (16:05 PDT) | Topic: Security

Disqus has confirmed its web commenting system was hacked.

The company, which builds and provides a web-based comment plugin for news websites, said Friday that hackers stole more than 17.5 million email addresses in a data breach in July 2012.

About a third of those accounts contained passwords, salted and hashed using the weak SHA-1 algorithm, which has largely been deprecated in recent years in favor of stronger password scramblers. The data also contained sign-up dates and the date of the last login.

Some of the exposed user information dates back to 2007.

Many of the accounts don't have passwords because they signed up to the commenting tool using a third-party service, like Facebook or Google.

The theft was only discovered this week after the database was sent to Troy Hunt, who runs data breach notification service Have I Been Pwned, who then informed Disqus of the breach.

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http://www.zdnet.com/article/disqus-confirms-comments-tool-hacked/