The crowdfunding industry has been walking confidently in the past few years but with the breach of one of its main players, now would be the time for these platforms to exercise more caution, the Entrepreneur reported.
Crowdfunding site Kickstarter encouraged users to replace their passwords last weekend after revealing that the well-known crowdfunding platform was breached, the report said citing a blog post by Kickstarter Chief Executive Officer Yancey Strickler.
According to Strickler, the incident compromised usernames, passwords, mailing and email addresses and phone numbers. However, Strickler said that credit card information was not stolen, the report said.
Strickler was also quoted in a CNN report as saying, "(W)e strongly recommend that you create a new password for your Kickstarter account, and other accounts where you use this password. We're incredibly sorry that this happened. We set a very high bar for how we serve our community, and this incident is frustrating and upsetting."
The Entrepreneur report about the matter added that when Kickstarter was notified of the incident, it started to bolstering its security system. The report quoted Strickler as saying, We are working closely with law enforcement and we are doing everything in our power to prevent this from happening again."
The hackers were able to get unauthorized access to some data belonging to their customers but Kickstarter said in a news release that "there is no evidence of unauthorized activity of any kind on all but two Kickstarter user accounts." The crowdfunding site, however, did not reveal the number of accounts that were compromised, the CNN report said.
The statement added that Kickstarter was informed of the hack by law enforcement authorities on Wednesday, February 12 and the site was able to address the security breach immediately, the report said.
The platform which enables individuals to secure funding for their projects, products and inventions has already raised over $981 million since it was rolled out in April 2009. Around 5.6 million people have promised to fund 56,000 projects introduced on the platform, information from the Kickstarter website showed.
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