Monday, March 23, 2015

Twitch, the video game streaming site Amazon bought for $970 million, has been hacked (AMZN)

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/twitch-got-hacked-2015-3

Twitch app

Game streaming website Twitch, which Amazon bought in August for $970 million, has been hacked. The service posted an update on its site saying something may have gained “unauthorized access” to user account information. 

“For your protection,” the post reads, “we have expired passwords and stream keys and have disconnected accounts from Twitter and YouTube.”

The company reached out to potentially affected users to let them know that information such as password, email address, user name, home address, phone number, and date of birth may have been compromised, the Wall Street Journal reports. 

Twitch hasn’t disclosed how many accounts were compromised or the duration of the attack.

Last August Twitch was hacked by the activist hacker group Lizard Squad, following news of its acquisition by Amazon. That attack, however, merely took the website offline and did not require password resets.  

It’s likely the company’s immense user growth piqued the interest of hackers. In 2012 the company reported 20 million monthly unique viewers. That stat has now skyrocketed to over 100 million monthly uniques. 

Twitch declined to comment beyond what it wrote in the initial blog post.

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