50m hit by LivingSocial hack attack

Amazon-funded daily deals site LivingSocial has been hit by a massive data breach, which the company admits could have led to the personal data of up to 50 million customers being compromised.
The company, the main rival of Groupon, has many top UK brands signed up to its scheme and last month launch a trial partnership with Tesco Clubcard.
The breach has triggered an apologetic email from chief executive Tim O’Shaughnessy explaining that their information may have been stolen. The email said: “LivingSocial recently experienced a cyber-attack on our computer systems that resulted in unauthorized access to some customer data from our servers. We are actively working with law enforcement to investigate this issue. The information accessed includes names, email addresses, date of birth for some users, and encrypted passwords – technically ‘hashed’ and ‘salted’ passwords. We never store passwords in plain text.”
At this stage, the company is saying that all credit card details for customers, and the financial accounts of operators that LivingSocial does deals with, are stored on a separate database and that this hasn’t been hacked.
But users are being urged to change their passwords and to ignore any emails claiming to be from LivingSocial that ask for financial information.
Amazon invested $175m (£113m) in the company in December 2010. As of early April, LivingSocial was valued at more than $3bn (£1.9bn).