The personal data of about 250 public users of the online developer community Stack Overflow may have been compromised after a hacker gained access to production tier systems. The attacks may have started as early as May 5 but weren’t detected until over a week later.
Stack Overflow has over 50 million unique visitors every month. Developers and coders frequent the site to exchange knowledge and find out about job opportunities.
Conor Reynolds reported on the data breach for the Computer Business Review:
Mary Ferguson VP of Engineering at Stack Overflow confirmed in a security blog post that: “We have identified privileged web requests that the attacker made that could have returned IP address, names, or emails for a very small number of Stack Exchange users.”
Stack Overflow later confirmed that the web request went out to approximately 250 public networks. The company is working to inform all users who are affected by the breach and are continuing steps to contain the damage.
According to Stack Overflow the hacker gained access to their systems by exploiting a vulnerability in a build deployed to the development tier of stackoverflow.com. This bug allowed the hacker to log into the development tier of the platform and gave them the ability to upgrade their access privileges.
Following its investigation Stack Overflow has discovered that the hacker was just exploring and probing Stack Overflow’s internal systems until they decided to grant themselves privileged access to the production tier systems. The company notes that at this point they quickly identified the breach and “revoked their access network-wide, began investigating the intrusion.”
Ferguson commented that: “Our customers’ and users’ security is of the utmost importance to us. After we conclude our investigation cycle, we will provide more information.”
