Yesterday, I received an unhappy email from the CEO of the on-line "crowdfunding" site Kickstarter, which regular folks use to raise money for unusual and creative projects and businesses. The email began:
On Wednesday night, law enforcement officials contacted Kickstarter and alerted us that hackers had sought and gained unauthorized access to some of our customers' data. Upon learning this, we immediately closed the security breach and began strengthening security measures throughout the Kickstarter system. … While no credit card data was accessed, some information about our customers was. Accessed information included usernames, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, and encrypted passwords. Actual passwords were not revealed, however it is possible for a malicious person with enough computing power to guess and crack an encrypted password, particularly a weak or obvious one.
So, Kickstarter suggested that I change my password. All in all, not a great situation, though it could have been worse it seems. For more on the Kickstarter breach, go here.