Robinhood admits data breach, millions of user data at risk
You could say that data wasn't Fryer Tucked away hard enough...
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Robinhood, the online stock trading platform and app has confirmed hackers have broken into their data. The trading platform reveals that over 5 million email addresses have been acquired by the data breachers, along with two million names potentially associated with these email addresses.
Moreso, Robinhood revealed that the reason for the data breach is due to a hacker socially engineering a customer service rep. They managed to get in pretending to be a customer service representative, thus gaining access to the back end. However, the hacker was only able to get a subset of information, not compromising Robinhood user’s bank detail or social details registered to its multinational user base, at least not on masse anyway. Only 30 or so people out of the 5 million accounts compromised have had extensive data stolen, and Robinhood has revealed they are working on resolving the issue with those individual users.
Robinhood are aware of who the user is and are actively working with law enforcement to handle the situation. In a statement on their website, Caleb Sima, the Chief security officer at Robinhood said: “As a Safety First company, we owe it to our customers to be transparent and act with integrity. Following a diligent review, putting the entire Robinhood community on notice of this incident now is the right thing to do.”
With the trading platform’s userbase now fully aware of the Robinhood data breach, it is highly advisable to change your email address and password to the account. If you use the email and password anywhere else, we recommend changing them too, and grabbing 2FA (two-factor authentication) when applicable. That email and password data could be anywhere right now, and the information gathered could be used at a future date to launch attacks against the emails and names leaked as part of the Robinhood security breach.
You can read all about the Robinhood data breach blog post on their website.
