Data

StockX confirms a data breach impacting 6.8 million customers

2 min read

StockX, an online marketplace for buying and selling sneakers, suffered a major data breach in May impacting 6.8 million customers. Records leaked included names, email addresses and hashed passwords. The full scale of this data breach came to light after an unnamed data breached seller contacted TechCrunch claiming information about the attack. Tech crunch then verified the claims by contacting people from a sample of 1,000 records using the information only they would know.

StockX released a statement yesterday acknowledging that a data breach had indeed occurred.

StockX says they were made aware of the breach on July 26 and immediately launched a forensic investigation and engaged experienced third-party data experts to assist. On getting evidence to suggest customer data may have been accessed by an unknown third party, they sent customers an email on August 3 to make them aware of the incident. This email surprisingly asked customers to reset their passwords citing system updates but said nothing about the data breach leaving users confused on what caused the alleged system update or why there was no prior warning.

Later the same day, StockX confirmed that they had discovered a data security issue and confirmed that an unknown third-party was able to gain access to certain customer data, including customer name, email address, shipping address, username, hashed passwords, and purchase history. The hashes were encrypted using MD5 with salts. According to weleakinfo, this is a very weak hashing algorithm; at least 90% of all hashes can be cracked successfully.

Users were infuriated that instead of being honest, StockX simply sent their customers an email asking them to reset their passwords.

StockX released a system-wide security update, a full password reset of all customer passwords with an email to customers alerting them about resetting their passwords, a high-frequency credential rotation on all servers and devices and a lockdown of their cloud computing perimeter. However, they were a little too late in their ‘ongoing investigation’ as they mention on their blog. Techcrunch revealed that the seller had put the data for sale for $300 in a dark web listing and one person had already bought the data. StockX is also subject to EU’s General Data Protection Regulation considering it has a global customer base and can be potentially fined for the incident.

According to FTC, StockX is also not compliant with the US laws regarding a data breach.

Read Next

Following Capital One data breach, GitHub gets sued and AWS security questioned by US Senator.

British Airways set to face record-breaking fine of £183m by the ICO over customer data breach.

U.S. Senator introduces bill that levies jail time and hefty fines for companies violating data breaches.

Sugandha Lahoti

Content Marketing Editor at Packt Hub. I blog about new and upcoming tech trends ranging from Data science, Web development, Programming, Cloud & Networking, IoT, Security and Game development.

Share
Published by
Sugandha Lahoti

Recent Posts

Top life hacks for prepping for your IT certification exam

I remember deciding to pursue my first IT certification, the CompTIA A+. I had signed…

3 years ago

Learn Transformers for Natural Language Processing with Denis Rothman

Key takeaways The transformer architecture has proved to be revolutionary in outperforming the classical RNN…

3 years ago

Learning Essential Linux Commands for Navigating the Shell Effectively

Once we learn how to deploy an Ubuntu server, how to manage users, and how…

3 years ago

Clean Coding in Python with Mariano Anaya

Key-takeaways:   Clean code isn’t just a nice thing to have or a luxury in software projects; it's a necessity. If we…

3 years ago

Exploring Forms in Angular – types, benefits and differences   

While developing a web application, or setting dynamic pages and meta tags we need to deal with…

3 years ago

Gain Practical Expertise with the Latest Edition of Software Architecture with C# 9 and .NET 5

Software architecture is one of the most discussed topics in the software industry today, and…

3 years ago