Zomato to update security of 6.6 mn accounts

Online restaurant guide and food ordering app Zomato will be reaching out to 6.6 million users, whose 'hashed' passwords could be 'theoretically decrypted' in order to get them to update their account security.

On Thursday, the company had reported that about 17 million user records have been stolen from its database, which included user email addresses and passwords but no payment information or credit card data.

"6.6 million users had password hashes in the 'leaked' data, which can be theoretically decrypted using brute force algorithms," Zomato said in a blogpost.

A hashed password is series of random-looking characters used by companies for security reasons to protect users.

The company will be reaching out to these users to get them to update their password on all services where they might have used the same password, it added.

Zomato said it was able to get in touch with the hacker, who had put the stolen user data up for sale. He has agreed to destroy all copies of the stolen data and take the data off the dark web marketplace.

The startup further said it will be introducing a bug bounty programme on Hackerone for security researchers very soon, which was the key demand of the hacker.

"The hacker has been very cooperative with us. He/she wanted us to acknowledge security vulnerabilities in our system and work with the ethical hacker community to plug the gaps," Zomato said.

The company said hacker also gave it all the details on the way he/she got access to this database.

The startup promised to post this information on their blog, once they close the loopholes so that it can be a lesson for others to follow. The disclosure comes at a time when the world is coping with the cyber attack by ransomware 'WannaCry', which has impacted IT networks in over 150 countries.
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WannaCry ransomware: 48k cyber attack instances in India, says Quick Heal

Security software maker Quick Heal said on Tuesday it had detected over 48,000 instances of the WannaCry ransomware attack in India, targeting both enterprises as well as individuals using systems running Microsoft’s Windows OS.

The WannaCry bug, for which India’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) issued a critical warning on April 13, has reportedly crippled hundreds of thousands of systems, especially healthcare and transport networks, across 150 countries. In a webcast on Monday, CERT-In said India had not been affected by the attack as badly as many other countries.

Quick Heal said the ransomware attack was not focused towards any particular industry but was spread across industries, “especially those organisations which are online and connected”.

graph “In the last few days, we have received distressed calls from customers belonging to verticals like education, banking, financial, manufacturing, healthcare and even from a few services sectors,” said Sanjay Katkar, managing director and chief technology officer of Quick Heal.

The IT security solutions provider said 60 per cent of the attacks were targeted at enterprises and rest at individuals in India. Kolkata saw the most attacks, followed by Delhi, Bhubaneshwar, Pune and Mumbai.

The WannaCry bug encrypts critical files on a computer it infects, with the attackers demanding $300 paid through Bitcoin to regain access to those files.

CERT-In on Monday advised victims of the attack to not pay the ransom and wait for researchers to develop a key with which they would be able to unlock their data.

Both CERT-In and Quick Heal have advised the system administrators and individuals to update Windows with the latest security patches issued by Microsoft. Further, users can take backups of their data to ensure that they do not lose it in case their systems get infected with the ransomware.
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