Breach, Data Security

Company that manages users’ online reputation hit by breach

An undisclosed number of customers had their personal information accessed, after an online reputation management company was breached.

On Tuesday, Reputation.com, a Redwood City, Calif.-based business, sent emails to customers about the incident. The company provides services such as removing negative or unwanted information about individuals or businesses from search sites.

According to the email sent to customers, accessed data includes names, email and physical addresses, and in some instance, phone numbers, dates of birth and job information of clients.

In addition, encrypted user passwords were breached for a “small minority” of Reputation.com users.

“A list of highly encrypted (‘salted' and ‘hashed') user passwords for a small minority of users was accessed,” said the email. “Although it was highly unlikely that these passwords could ever be decrypted, we immediately changed the password of every user to prevent any possible unauthorized account access.”

Salting is a security method where a sequence of symbols is added to passwords before they're hashed, as an added layer of security.

SCMagazine.com reached out to the company, but did not hear back immediately.

Reputation.com is offering a year of free credit monitoring to affected customers. The company has said that no financial information, Social Security or driver's license numbers, or details regarding clients' accounts or services were exposed in the incident.

In the email, the company said it “swiftly shut down” the attack on its network, once it was discovered.

LivingSocial, a daily-deal website, is the most recent online company to suffer a similar breach.

Last Friday, the company announced that more than 50 million of its customers were impacted when its computer systems were hacked, exposing the email addresses, dates of birth and salted passwords of users. 

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