File Sharing Site Bolt Hacked, 995,000 Accounts Exposed

A tweet Friday by the website haveibeenpwned.com suggested the file-sharing site Bolt was hacked, and almost a million accounts were compromised.

Have I Been Pwned? (HIPB) is a website using which one could check if their personal data has been accessed by unauthorized parties in data breaches.

Collating information regarding hundreds of millions of leaked accounts on the internet, the website analyses this data and enables users to search for their information using their username or email address. Widely considered as a valuable resource for those who take their data security seriously, HIPB came into being on Dec. 4, 2013, and their reveals about major data breaches are considered seriously by data experts.

As for the tweet about the data breach on Bolt, most of it is clear, but you might be baffled by the term “salted.”

Salt is a term used in cryptography. It refers to random data that could be used to “hash” passwords. Hash, in simple terms, is a concept which makes a unit of information encrypted. So, using a salt, you can store a password in an encrypted form rather than the traditional mode of storing them as plaintext inside security systems.

This is to say, whoever breached the accounts in Bolt were pretty good at what they were doing since they had to breach though a whole lot of data protection.

A massive 999K accounts are said to have been breached in the attack, making the hack even more impressive.

With more and more number of people across the globe using digital files and documents for their work and personal use, services that help you store digital files securely and share the files with others if needed — again, securely — is fast becoming a huge global industry. As per market intelligence website, insightpartners.com, the industry was worth $1.35 billion in 2015 and is projected to grow to $10.57 billion by 2025.

With big names including Google Drive and Dropbox in the fray, the security expectations from file sharing services is high. Also, going forward, the number of people who would rely on such services to keep their ever-growing digital documents that may contain sensitive personal and professional data stands to rise. And the way hackers work, the more number of accounts that they could breach, the more they stand to gain, which is never a good thing.

File sharing sits have been a particular target for hackers for long because of the fact that such sites typically contain a large number of information-rich documents in one place. It is easy to imagine why a hacker would find this attractive. Even as far back as 2004, there were reports of worms like Phatbot which hackers targeted specifically at file sharing networks.

In 2017, we have a drastically different digital landscape from 2004 — one where the amount of digital information and the vulnerabilities are higher. Let’s hope that HIPB and others like iy wouldn’t have many such breaches to report in the future.

As of now, there is no information on who is behind the attack on Bolt.