The hits just keep on coming. After CDSN, Tianya, Netease’s email system, and a number of other major sites saw massive leaks of user data, e-commerce giant 360Buy is the latest company to get caught up in what’s now being called Hacker Leak Gate on the Chinese internet.
Specifically, data leak reporting website WooYun, which has broken the news of several of these hacks/leaks, reported yesterday that 360Buy had suffered a leaking of user data thanks to a security flaw that allowed access to users’ names, addresses, phone numbers, and emails, among other things. 360Buy confirmed the leak, labeled it a medium-level security threat, and promised to handle it immediately.
Yesterday, we wrote about a possible motivation for all these attacks and data leaks: they may be an ideological challenge to the increasing prevalence of real-name registration systems that are being implemented on lots of sites, most recently microblogs. Regardless of whether that’s the reason, though, leaks of data from e-commerce sites are particularly concerning because of the amount of sensitive financial information stored on those sites and their integrated services. As yet, the target doesn’t seem to be users’ money, but you’d still be a fool not to change the passwords to any Chinese e-commerce and payment services you use.
It’s also worth noting that because most of these leaks have been publications of username/password combinations, any user who uses the same login credentials for more than one site is especially at risk. If that’s you, change your passwords now. Don’t wait until it’s too late. In fact, even if that’s not you, change your passwords. Better safe than sorry.
[via Sina Tech]
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