The company is confident that the passwords can't be misused

Mar 8, 2014 08:32 GMT  ·  By

Statista, the company that provides statistics and studies from over 18,000 sources, has been hacked. The company believes the hackers could have accessed its user database.

In an email sent out to impacted customers, the company admits that the cybercriminals might have stolen email addresses and passwords. However, Statista is confident that passwords can’t be misused because they’re properly encrypted.

“According to an internal assessment and that of external IT professionals the password data cannot be used by third parties due to masking procedures. Of course, you can still change your assigned password at any time in your profile if you wish,” Statista wrote in the notifications.

The company has not revealed how exactly the passwords are “masked,” but if external IT professionals say they can’t be misused, they’ve probably used strong encryption.

On the other hand, the email addresses can still be valuable for targeted phishing attacks, so users should be careful in case they come across suspicious emails in their inboxes.

Statista says it’s confident that the vulnerability exploited by the hackers has been patched.

Since the company isn’t providing too many details, I’ve reached out to their representatives to find out how many users are impacted by the breach, and what type of encryption they’ve used. I’ll update this post if additional information becomes available.