Timehop, a popular app that was used by people to relieve old posts has been hacked, as revealed by the company in a blogpost.
“On July 4 2018, Timehop experienced a network intrusion that led to a breach of some of your data,” Timehop said in the post. The company revealed that around 2:04 pm Eastern Time (9:04 pm East Africa Time), they observed the intrusion and it occured due to their cloud computing environment being compromised. Apparently the cloud computing account had not been protected by two factor authentication, which is a really weird oversight for a company that stores user data. They have since corrected that.
The data that was breached included names, email addresses and some phone numbers. However they said that no direct messages, financial data, Timehop data or social media/photo content were affected. This breach apparently affected some 21 million of their users.
Thanks to this breach, Timehop had to deactivate keys that let the app show you your social media posts, which means you may have to re-authenticate the app. Also from their investigation, they did not find evidence that any of these accounts were accessed without authorization.
The big issue with this hack is the phone number leak and Timehop says that if you used your phone number to login, then the system has your phone number. This means there is a high likelihood of your phone number being among the leaked ones and you’ll have to take extra security precautions to ensure that your phone number is secured.