Adobe Hack Leaves Millions of Customers Vulnerable

Dennis Faas's picture

Adobe has been the target of a major attack by hackers. The result: the personal information of roughly three million Adobe customers has been exposed.

Adobe's senior director of security for products and services, Brad Arkin, says the attackers took aim at customer data and source codes for a wide range of Adobe products, including Acrobat, ColdFusion, and ColdFusion Builder.

Adobe is less concerned about the latter, and says the source code leak does not mean there is an "increased risk to customers as a result of [the] incident."

Adobe also says that their investigation of the hack has turned up no evidence that zero-day attacks have resulted from the breach. (Source: cnet.com)

Names, Credit and Debit Data Exposed

But it's not all good news. Arkin admits that extremely sensitive information associated with 2.9 million Adobe customer accounts was accessed by the hackers. That information includes customer names as well as debit and credit card data.

Thankfully much of the financial information that was lost had been encrypted, meaning it should take time for the hackers to exploit the situation. Arkin insists the hackers failed to remove any debit or credit card numbers that were not encrypted.

Adobe says it's currently working with federal law enforcement officials to investigate the security breach. In the meantime, it suggests customers take several steps to protect themselves.

First, users should check the email associated with their Adobe account. If they've been affected by the breach Adobe says users will be contacted by the company soon.

Second, Adobe says users should change their password for other services if they used the same passcode to protect their Adobe account.

Adobe says that it has reset passwords on all of its customers' accounts.

Free Credit Monitoring Offered to Those Affected by Breach

Adobe says it plans to offer all customers affected by the attack a free, one-year membership in a credit monitoring program.

Arkin also offered Adobe customers an apology. "We deeply regret that this incident occurred," he said.

It's not yet clear when the attack took place or who was responsible. Adobe only says the attacks were "sophisticated" and were carried out "very recently". (Source: theguardian.com)

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