Almost after a week of the attack, Stack Overflow admitted in an official security update yesterday, that their production systems has been hacked.
“Over the weekend, there was an attack on Stack Overflow. We have confirmed that some level of production access was gained on May 11”, said Mary Ferguson ,VP of Engineering at Stack Overflow.
In this short update, the company has mentioned that they are investigating the extent of the access and are addressing all the known vulnerabilities. Though not confirmed, the company has identified no breach of customer or user data.
Stack Overflow says hackers breached production systems https://t.co/Dq6LOaMh2H
— Graham Cluley (@gcluley) May 17, 2019
Some users are acknowledging the fact that that the firm has at least come forward and accepted the security violation.
A user on Reddit said, “Wow. I’m glad they’re letting us know early, but this sucks”
There are other users who think that security breach due to hacking is very common nowadays.
A user on Hacker News commented, “I think we’ve reached a point where it’s safe to say that if you’re using a service -any service – assume your data is breached (or willingly given) and accessible to some unknown third party. That third party can be the government, it can be some random marketer or it can be a malicious hacker. Just hope that you have nothing anywhere that may be of interest or value to anyone, anywhere. Good luck.”
Few days ago, there were reports that Stack Overflow directly links to Facebook profile pictures. This means that the linking unintentionally allows user activity throughout Stack Exchange to be tracked by Facebook and also tracks the topics that the users are interested in.
Read More: Facebook again, caught tracking Stack Overflow user activity and data
Stack Overflow has also assured users that more information will be provided to them, once the company concludes the investigation.
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