The Last.fm music site and the eHarmony dating service said some user passwords were stolen, a day after another online company, LinkedIn, confirmed a security breach.
“We are currently investigating the leak of some Last.fm user passwords,” the London-based company, which recommends music to listeners, said today on its website. “As a precautionary measure, we’re asking all our users to change their passwords immediately.”
Closely held EHarmony, based in Santa Monica, California, said it reset the passwords of affected members, after investigating reports some were compromised.
“We have found that a small fraction of our user base has been affected,” EHarmony said on its website. “We are continuing to investigate.”
Last.fm, with almost 40 million users, will update customers on the status of the breach through its Twitter account, Luke Fredberg, director of international corporate communications for owner CBS in London, said in an interview. He declined to comment beyond the statement, which didn’t specify how many accounts were affected.
Read more on Digital Life.
With respect to the Last.fm breach, Paul Roberts reports:
Last.fm, the online music streaming service, said it has implemented ‘more rigorous’ security for customer account passwords in the wake of reports that some of those passwords had been leaked online.
In a post on the company’s Website, Last.fm said that its investigation of reports that hashed (or encrypted) passwords for Last.fm accounts were among those found on a Russian website this week wasn’t complete but was “important enough to act on,” and reiterated its request that all users change their account password and any sites where they reused that password. The company also said it had taken additional steps to secure password data, though it did not go into detail about what those steps were.
Read more on ThreatPost.
eHarmony, who says that passwords, but no other information, were stolen and LinkedIn are both reaching out to law enforcement for help in investigating the breaches. Brian Prince reports:
LinkedIn and eHarmony have contacted law enforcement authorities to help investigate the posting of a treasure trove of user passwords online. LinkedIn even brought in the FBI to help with the investigation of how millions of user passwords were leaked.
Earlier this week, the news circulated that a file with some 6.45 million SHA-1 hashed but unsalted passwords of LinkedIn users had been posted on a Russian Web forum. Other postings on the forum included hashes for 1.5 million passwords believed to belong to eHarmony users, though the dating site has not confirmed the number. In both cases, although the passwords were hashed, some have been decoded.
Read more on eWeek.
Update: Eduard Kovacs reports that the Last.fm hack likely occurred over one year ago and may have involved 17 million passwords. So…. if that’s true, when did they discover the hack, and why didn’t they discover it over a year ago??