Zomato hacking: Security breach results in 17 million user data stolen

Zomato, a restaurant search and discovery service founded in 2008 by Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah, has suffered a security breach with over 17 million user records stolen from the food-tech company's database. The stolen information has email addresses and hashed passwords of customers.

According to Hackeread.com, a user by the name of "nclay" claimed to have hacked Zomato and was willing to sell data pertaining to 17 million registered users on a popular Dark Web marketplace.

This included emails and password hashes of registered Zomato users with the price set for the whole package at $1,001.43 (BTC 0.5587) - BTC here stands for Bitcoins. Hackeread adds the vendor also published data and evidence to prove it was genuine.

Hashing turns an original password into an incoherent set of characters, bringing down the possibility of it being easily converted back to plain text. Furthermore, passwords of Zomato's 120 million users are reportedly salted as well, whereby characters are added at random before the password hashed, rendering it unintelligible even if the hash is translated.

Although in theory the password may still be safe, Zomato is encouraging its users to change that password if used for any other services.

Amid the news of the leak, no payment information or credit card data has been stolen, the company said in a note released to the press. 'In our security investigation, we have found no evidence of unauthorized access to financial information,' it states. 'Payment related information on Zomato is stored separately from this (stolen) data in a highly secure PCI Data Security Standard (DSS) compliant vault,' it further added.

Despite assurances that increased levels of precautions were made to safeguard users' data, the company, as a preventive measure, has reset the passwords for all affected users and logged them out of its app and website. 'Since we have reset the passwords, affected users' Zomato account as well as credit card information is secure, so there is nothing to worry about there.'

In the blogpost, Zomato has attributed human error as the cause of the security breach where an employee’s development account got compromised. 'Our team is actively scanning all possible breach vectors and closing any gaps in our environment,' the blog stated.

Over the next couple of weeks, the company will reportedly work towards plugging further security gaps - if any - in its systems. This will include adding a layer of authorisation for internal teams having access to such data to avoid the possibility of any human breach.

Zomato, which provides information and reviews on restaurants, including images of menus where the restaurant does not have its own website, currently operates in 23 countries, including India, Australia and the United States.