Breach, Compliance Management, Data Security, Network Security, Privacy

Comcast to reset 200K passwords after accounts compromised

Comcast is resetting thousands of customer passwords after their account information was spotted being marketed for up to $1,000 on a dark web site.

How many victims? Nearly 590,000 accounts were allegedly part of a stolen data dump that was for sale however, only 200,000 or so were active and posed a risk.

What type of information? Email addresses and passwords.

What happened? Comcast said that the breach was not the result of any of its systems or applications being compromised. The company blamed the incident on malware infecting unsuspecting customers or attackers using other schemes to obtain information from the victims.

What was the response? Comcast will not be offering credit monitoring services because the company itself was not hacked. Victims will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis and those who were affected will be forced to reset their passwords.

Details? On Nov. 7 computer researcher @flanvel tweeted a short list of the accounts being sold on the Dark Web. The seller reportedly offered a list of 112 accounts as proof and offered to sell 100,000 accounts for $300. Comcast was aware of the incident by the afternoon and had their security team checking each record against the ISP's in their data bases.

Quote: “We're taking this seriously and we're working to get this fixed for those customers who may have been impacted,” a company spokesperson told the Washington post adding, “but the vast majority of information out there was invalid.”

Source: CSO Online

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