CouchSurfing investigates data breach after 17m user records appear on hacking forum

guest · Jul 23, 2020

CouchSurfing investigates data breach after 17m user records appear on hacking forum
EXCLUSIVE: CouchSurfing working with law enforcement and security firm to investigate incident
July 22, 2020
https://www.zdnet.com/article/couch...ter-17m-user-records-appear-on-hacking-forum/

CouchSurfing, an online service that lets users find free lodgings, is investigating a security breach after hackers began selling the details of 17 million users on Telegram channels and hacking forums.
The CouchSurfing data is currently being sold for $700, ZDNet has learned from a data broker, a person who buys and sells hacked data for profit on the hacking underground.

The data broker, who requested anonymity for this article, was not able to identify the hacker but said the CouchSurfing data, which first appeared in private Telegram channels last week, has been advertised as being taken from CouchSurfing's servers earlier this month, in July 2020.
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User passwords were not included, although it is unclear if hackers got their hands on passwords and simply chose not to share them.

CouchSurfing is currently ranked as one of the top 11,000 most popular websites on the internet, according to Amazon's Alexa traffic ranking.
The impact of the CouchSurfing breach is lower than other security incidents at other companies, as password information was not included.
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A theory shared by the data broker with ZDNet is that the CouchSurfing data could have originated from a misplaced backup file, as most companies regularly back up their user databases and don't usually include password strings in their backups.
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