Imgur Recently Discovered It Was Hacked In 2014, Exposing 1.7 Million Accounts

The image-sharing website Imgur recently found out that it was hacked back in 2014 and that over 1.7 million accounts on the platform were exposed as a result. The information that was compromised by the incident includes emails and passwords. What’s more troubling is that the website only learned of the hack when a security researcher discovered alerted them to it.

The breach was discovered by famed cybersecurity expert Troy Hunt, who has been involved in uncovering numerous other hacking incidents in the past. With regards to the Imgur data breach, it would seem that no other personal information was stolen, ZDNet reports. The site did not ask its users to input details like real names or addresses, so those sets of information are safe.

What’s more, the 1.7 million accounts that were compromised are just a small fraction of the 150 million users that Imgur has. Even so, suffering a data breach that took more than three years to discover does highlight the increasing threat of hackers stealing user information.

Once Imgur was alerted to the issue, however, moved to reset the passwords of the accounts that were affected by the data breach as well as issue a public service announcement regarding the incident. Hunt himself was impressed by how fast the website acted on the information.

"I disclosed this incident to Imgur late in the day in the midst of the US Thanksgiving holidays," Hunt said. "That they could pick this up immediately, protect impacted accounts, notify individuals and prepare public statements in less than 24 hours is absolutely exemplary."

Compared to some of the most recent headlines of major companies getting hacked, the case of Imgur might not seem all that significant and its response certainly earned it some goodwill. For example, Uber got hacked last year that exposed over 57 million users and chose to cover it up, which resulted in its security chief getting fired.