Zomato, the food-tech giant is still tarnished by the security breach of its user’s data last week. The company is still working on the transparent model by explaining how the unidentified ethical hacker was able to breach the infrastructure to get a hold of the company’s database to steal the data.
As per the company blog which was signed off by the owner himself, Zomato has traced the hacker back to an incident in the November of 2015 where the user database of 000webhost was leaked online. 000webhost, a free website hosting service provider had it’s 13 million user password leaked during October 2015.
Deepinder Goyal said that, “One of our developers had his personal hosting account with the service. As a result, his email address and password which was the same combination on Github as well and also became available publicly”.
Till then, two-factor authentication was not being used on Github.
Why Data is being misused now
In the blog company also stated that, “The hacker was then able to log into his Github account and review one of the code repositories to which the developer had access”.
It is noticeable that when data was conscious of the programmer for considerable years then why it is being misused now. Moreover, hacker cannot directly access the entire database after getting a smaller part of the code.
Goyal said that, ‘Our systems are only accessible for a specific set of IP addresses. But the hacker was able to exploit vulnerability in the code to access the database. That piece of code was a part of a deprecated system, and had not been modified for a few years now”.
Part of the code cannot be exploited
Goyal is in agreement with the fact that it is not a safe practice to give access to someone to some piece of its code. He also added that the company is making sure that the piece of code cannot be exploited to access Zomato’s data. The company is using all sorts of method to ensure that the piece of code is outdated with every passing day.
Company got noticeable spike in traffic
Zomato claims that on the contrary the company has noticed a slight spike in its traffic which is unexpected after the breach incident.
Company stated in its blogpost that, “We are thankful and extremely lucky to have a brand which people love and are willing to forgive for even some very big mistakes”.
How to apply break on security breaches
Zomato affirms in its blogpost that the company uses multiple environments and each of thepart is isolated and containing different piece of information. Well it stated that, “The hacker did not gain access to all the various databases used by different businesses”.
Hacker was working on old code
The company switched to a two step authentication process on Github recently which restricted the hacker’s access to the developer account of Github for the latest code.
Company said that, “The hacker was working off an old code base, limiting the extent of data the hacker could access”.
Payment processing is fine
Additionally, company stated in blogpost that its network confinements assured that its servers did not fail to secure its payment processing systems which are already running on isolated platform.
Security breaches and how it resolved
A week ago, Zomato had announced that it had endured a security breach with more than 17 million client records stolen that include email addresses and passwords from the organization’s database.
After exposing the data on the dark web marketplace, the hacker took down the data and destroyed it after coming to terms with the company. Post this incident the food-tech giant will be launching a bug bounty program on Hackerzone to identify any loopholes in its code.