Some 15million people need to check their passwords after a huge data breach was revealed. Plex – a popular free-to-watch boxset and movie streaming service – has this week admitted it was hit by a huge data breach. The platform said hackers got access to a database housing encrypted password, username and email information.
Credit card and other payment data wasn’t accessed, but in response to this breach Plex said it was requiring all passwords to be reset.
Plex haș around 30million users, and a spokesperson for the service said information belonging to at least half of its users was impacted by the breach.
In an email sent out to customers on Thursday notifying them of the issue, Plex said: “Yesterday, we discovered suspicious activity on one of our databases. We immediately began an investigation and it does appear that a third-party was able to access a limited subset of data that includes emails, usernames, and encrypted passwords. Even though all account passwords that could have been accessed were hashed and secured in accordance with best practices, out of an abundance of caution we are requiring all Plex accounts to have their password reset. Rest assured that credit card and other payment data are not stored on our servers at all and were not vulnerable in this incident.”
Plex said they identified how the third-party accessed its data and are taking further steps to increase security.
Besides asking all customers to change their passwords, Plex said users have to tick ‘sign out connected devices after password change’ when they tweak their logins.
This will log a Plex user out of all devices that used the previous password and request the new one is entered.
While this may be an inconvenience it will help protect the security of your account further.
It’s also important to point out that if you share passwords across accounts – which is a good practice no no – and you use Plex then it’s best to change passwords across the board.
There’s a reason security experts tell people not to share passwords across accounts, and that’s because if a hacker gains your password for one service they can then access many others.
To create a strong password, it’s a good idea to use a mixture of lower and upper case characters, numbers and special symbols.
Also, make sure you use unique passwords for different accounts.
While this can be difficult to remember you can use password managers to aid you or just go old school and jot down all your logins on a written hard copy that is kept in a safe place.