Home Cyber Attack Online Education Platform Thinkful Resets Passwords Following Security Breach

Online Education Platform Thinkful Resets Passwords Following Security Breach

by Abeerah Hashim
GitHub OAuth user tokens breach

The online developer education site Thinkful turns out to be the latest victim of a cyber attack. As confessed by the firm, Thinkful suffered a security breach following which they reset the passwords of all users.

Thinkful Endured Security Breach

The online education platform for developers, Thinkful, has suffered a security breach. While they presently haven’t observed any misuse of the data, they did confirm a breach by an attacker who gained access to the firm’s data.

The company disclosed that the attackers accessed the firm’s data by acquiring employee login credentials. Upon identifying the matter, they informed all the users as a precaution. BleepingComputer has shared a copy of the email sent to the users. As stated in that email,

We recently discovered that an unauthorized party may have gained access to certain Thinkful company credentials so, out of an abundance of caution, we are notifying all of our users.

Nonetheless, they assured that the breach did not let the attackers view sensitive data. This applies to both the government-issued ID numbers and financial data of the users.

These credentials could not have provided the unauthorized party with access to government issued identification numbers (e.g., social security numbers) or financial information, such as credit card numbers, bank account numbers, or loan information.

Thinkful Resets Passwords

The firm has ensured that the security breach has made no significant impact on users’ data privacy. Moreover, they updated credentials to contain the attack. Also, they have taken other security steps to keep the users safe. This includes a thorough investigation of the matter as well as jazzing up their security.

They still ask all users to reset their passwords out of an abundance of caution.

As a measure of added precaution, we are requiring all users to reset their Thinkful passwords.

However, they haven’t yet revealed any details regarding the timeline of the incident and the extent of the impact.

Thinkful is an online developer education website that has recently been acquired by Chegg – an education technology firm. Incidentally, Chegg also faced a similar security breach in September 2018, following which they reset customers’ passwords.

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