Streaming service company Plex informed its customers on Wednesday of a data breach that impacted most of the platform’s user accounts. According to an email sent by Plex, intruders could access the usernames, email addresses, and passwords of approximately 20 million users.
Plex offers streaming services for movies, music, and games as well as hosting for user-generated audio and visual content. In the email, Plex didn’t mention the impact area of the breach, but a company spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that “the majority†of its ~20 million accounts were impacted.
Among those impacted includes password leak monitoring and the data breach search service Have I Been Pwned? founder Troy Hunt. It is unlikely that users’ passwords could be cracked and give a match on Have I Been Pwned? because Plex said that all passwords were “hashed and secured in accordance with best practices.†Nevertheless, Plex is advising users to reset their passwords out of caution.
Plex clarified that no credit card and payment information, personal account information or other data was compromised in the incident.
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The company also recommended users sign out of all existing browsers/devices as they reset passwordsOpens a new window . Users can also enable two-factor authentication for prudence.
The Plex website displayed an “internal server error†for several users who attempted to reset their password after receiving the notification email from Plex. However, reports on DownDetector indicate that this has now been resolved.
“We’ve already addressed the method that this third-party employed to gain access to the system, and we’re doing additional reviews to ensure that the security of all our systems is further hardened to prevent future incursions,†Plex said without providing the details of the attack vector used in the breach.
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