Flipboard Confirms Two Hacks, Prompts Password Resets

Flipboard, a news aggregator and content-sharing platform, has confirmed two separate security incidents in which unauthorized attackers broke into some of its databases.

The company launched a breach investigation on April 23, when it learned these databases had been hacked. It found someone had accessed, and potentially obtained copies of, databases with user information between June 2, 2018, and March 23, 2019, as well as April 21-22, 2019.

These databases stored account information belonging to a subset of Flipboard's 150 million users; the company has not disclosed the total number of people affected. Compromised data includes names, Flipboard usernames, email addresses, passwords, and digital tokens used to connect Flipboard accounts to third-party accounts like Facebook or Google. Flipboard does not collect government-issued IDs or payment card, bank account, or any other financial data.

"Not all Flipboard users' account information was involved in the incident," officials report in a blog post. "We're still identifying the accounts involved and as a precaution, we reset all users' passwords and replaced or deleted all digital tokens." The company also says there is no evidence indicating attackers used digital tokens to access users' third-party accounts.

Flipboard does note the passwords were never stored in plaintext. Those created or changed after March 14, 2012, were cryptographically protected with the bcrypt function. Passwords created before then were salted and hashed with SHA-1, officials say in the blog post.

Owners of compromised accounts can continue to use Flipboard on devices where they're already logged in. When Flipboard is accessed from a new device, or someone logs out of Flipboard on their current device, they'll be asked to create a new password when they log in.

Read more details here.