Popular video streaming website Plex suffered a data breach on July 1 in which the hacker gained access to customers’ personal information such as IP addresses, forum private messages, email addresses and encrypted passwords, Chris Curtis, company’s support engineer said in a blog post released yesterday.
A hacker by the name of ‘Savaka’ demanded 9.5 BTC (or $2,400) in ransom by today. If Plex decides not to pay Savaka 9.5 Bitcoin by today, he will increase the amount by 5 Bitcoin, taking the total to 14.5 Bitcoin.
The hacker threatens to leak all the data hacked via multiple torrent networks in case of no payment.
Savaka ends the message, now available on Reddit, saying “I don’t care who the BTC comes from as long as the payment is made: no data will be released.”
Co-founder and CTO of Plex Elan Feingold commented on the Reddit post to alleviate the concerns of the consumers. He said,
“We’re investigating. The forums machine was definitely compromised, likely via PHP/IPB vulnerability. We have no reason to believe that any other part of our infrastructure was compromised, but we’re investigating.”
The official blog post said that the company has reset the passwords of all the users with linked forum accounts as a precautionary measure. The forums have been shut down following the attack while other systems remain online and operational.
“We have no reason to believe that any other parts of our system were compromised, and we never store credit card or other payment data on our systems.”
Plex has provided solutions to common issues reported by the users after they changed their passwords.
- If your account keeps getting locked after the password change, disable the “plexWatch” app or other third party running app or update the password in its settings.
- In case you are unable to remotely access your server, Plex recommends signing in to the server locally to login again.
We will be connected with the issue and report the latest as it comes, so stay tuned with us!
