Friday, November 29, 2019

Mixcloud Investigating Alleged Data Breach Impacting 21 Million Users

A data reseller is advertising an alleged 21 million user accounts stolen from music streaming site Mixcloud on the dark web.

The seller, who goes by the handle "A_W_S," is currently asking for around 0.5 bitcoins, or approximately $4,000, for the data.

Motherboard informed Mixcloud of the apparent breach. Company CTO and co-founder Mat Clayton said this was the first they had heard of the incident, and started investigating the issue.

Mixcloud lets users upload their own DJ mixes and tracks for others to listen to. In July the company launched a "Premium" subscription service and limited features for free users. In 2017, the company said it had over 17 million users.

A_W_S provided Motherboard with a sample of 1,000 Mixcloud accounts. The data includes usernames, email addresses, and hashed passwords. Hashing is a way of scrambling passwords so they can be stored more securely. Mixcloud appears to have hashed its passwords with the SHA256 algorithm, making them robust to cracking from hackers. A_W_S said the data was obtained in late 2019.

To verify the data, Motherboard took a random selection of the email addresses and tried to create accounts on Mixcloud with them. In all of the cases this was not possible as the addresses were already linked to Mixcloud accounts, corroborating the data's legitimacy.

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