Slack will reset the passwords of users it believes are affected by a historical data breach that affected the company more than four years ago. In 2015, the company said it was hit by hackers who gained access to its user profile database, including their scrambled passwords. But the hackers inserted code that scraped the user’s plaintext password as it was entered by users at the time. According to TechCrunch, Slack said it was recently contacted through its bug bounty about a list of allegedly compromised Slack account passwords. The company said the security incident does not apply to “the approximately 99% who joined Slack after March 2015” or those who changed their password since. Accounts that require single sign-on through a company’s network are not affected. The company also said it has no reason to believe accounts were compromised but provided no evidence for its claim.
Boris Cipot, Senior Security Engineer at Synopsys:
“As the gatekeepers to sensitive information, passwords act as the first line of defence against potential intruders. For this reason, every organisation should have both a strong password policy and an incident response plan for events such as this. While the passwords were reset following the initial compromise in 2015, this recurrence is likely to have stemmed from password reuse. As such, Slack is acting responsibly by changing affected account passwords in an effort to keep their users secure.”
