19 February, 2016, USA: Hackers took Spotify company for a toss as they hacked and leaked hundreds of company’s users’ premium account online, as per reports by Forbes magazine. On Monday morning, company’s user information was easily available in three different online data dumps on Pastebin.
Apart from email addresses and passwords, few dumps also had in-depth information of the users such as home countries, account types (such as premium or free), and account renewal dates were also published. More than 80 individual users confirmed that the leaked account info was correct. Fifteen different users also confirmed that the leaked passwords were unique to Spotify, reports Forbes.
Commenting on the leaked User IDs and Passwords, Spokesperson of Spotify said, “We monitor Pastebin and other sites regularly. When we find Spotify credentials, we first verify that they are authentic, and if they are, we immediately notify affected users to change their passwords.” On the other hand, when a media company spoke to few of the Spotify users whose accounts were hacked, they disagreed with the company’s statement and said that they have not been notified by the company stating that their accounts have been breached. On top of that, the company told the users that their accounts are safe and secured, when the users contacted the company about their compromised accounts.
However, the picture is still not clear as the identities of hackers are still unknown. But the incident has certainly put a big question mark on the security of the company which may hamper its reputation and image.