CLOUDBLEED Data Leak: Change Your Passwords Today

Today I woke up in a bit of a panic after checking my emails.

I got a message from Google telling me that someone is attempting to recover one of my email accounts. Obviously, this was not me. I’ve gotten emails like this before but every time it happens, I become alarmed realizing that someone is trying get access to my account. After checking the security log within my accounts to make sure I have not been hacked, I changed my passwords.

As I was scanning Twitter this morning shortly after my scare, I found out about the Cloudbleed data leak that could have potentially spread people’s passwords and other sensitive personal data around the internet.

Cloudflare is a company that helps optimize the security and performance of 5.5 million websites. It had a bug in the source code that exposed personal information on the internet. Some well-known websites that use Cloudflare are Uber, FitBit and OkCupid and Discord. And the people at Discord are telling you to change your passwords to Medium, Patreon and Reddit also, to be on the safe side.

Discord

Here are some important details to know:

Cloudflare helps optimize the security and performance of over 5.5 million websites. User data from 3,400 websites has been leaked and cached by search engines thanks to a bug in Cloudflare. The leaked data includes usernames, passwords, cookies, authentication tokens, API keys, and others. Among several other popular services, 1Password was also affected by this bug. However, thanks to end-to-end encryption, no customer data was exposed of 1Password users.

“While Cloudflare’s service was rapidly patched to eliminate this bug, data was leaking constantly before this point – for months. Some of this data was cached publicly in search engines such as Google, and is being removed. Other data might exist in other caches and services throughout the Internet.”

According to the reports, Cloudflare acknowledged that the leak was severe but is currently downplaying its impact.

The CTO of Cloudflare is saying that people don’t need to do anything in response to the leak, but security experts have a different suggestion: change your passwords.