You probably are not that worried that your information on an online image sharing community site may have been compromised, but still, it’s best to try and learn as much as you can about it. Imgur is doing just that after it was revealed that back in 2014, around 1.7 million user accounts may have been compromised in a data breach. They have only been informed about this and so they are still currently investigating how this could have happened.
Just last November 23, a security researcher who deals with data breaches sent an email to Imgur, saying that someone sent him data that included information about Imgur users. After contacting the necessary people, including founder/CEO Alan Schaff, they arranged to securely receive the data from the researcher and confirmed that these were indeed the information from 1.7 million Imgur users, although the breach happened 3 years ago in 2014.
Fortunately, the only data they were able to get were the email addresses and passwords, since the site doesn’t really ask for actual names, addresses, phone numbers and other personally-identifying information. Still, if there’s a chance that you used this email address and password combination in other sites, then whoever hacked this can also hack into whatever site or app you used it in.
They have already notified users that were included in the data breach and told them to immediately change their password, if they haven’t done so the past three years. They’re still investigating how it could have happened and will also do an internal security review of systems and processes to ensure that this will not happen again.
SOURCE: Imgur
