Email hashed passwords of 18 Million Ixigo users got stolen, CEO denied of any such breach

Key Highlights

Ixigo has over 20 million monthly users in November 2018 and it has over 100 million users in its basket.

Email Ids and password of 18 million users of Ixigo users got stolen.

Yahoo, Uber, Equifax, and eBay also faced the biggest data leaks problem online. 

Gurugram based travel and Tourism Company is facing a catastrophic situation of stolen email Ids and password of 18 million users. This is a fraction of broad hacking in which user information is leaked from seven several global sites including home improvement website Houzz.

Ixigo CEO Alok Bajpai has issued a notification to its registered users to reset email id and passwords for safety purpose. According to a report of British news platform The Register First, Ixigo had over 20 million monthly users in November and it has over 100 million users in total.

Ixigo is currently investigating this security Breach. CEO Bajpai said, “We are a travel marketplace and users data and privacy is our first priority. We never store payment information like card details or net banking details of any user. We use a one-way hashing algorithm to encrypt and hash our password and they can’t be easily unhashed and most of the market giants use same hashing algorithm for password security.”

Hashing refers to representing any sort of data in unique characters. So if someone illegally gets access to data it doesn’t mean that they can hack account of a person because they are not issued with password.

Bajpai also added,  ” Most of the Ixigo users use their Google and Facebook account and mobile numbers to access our platform and access through mobile number is OTP based so it cannot be used to hack passwords and Google and Facebook themselves take care of password security while signing in using their platform on our website or app.

He also said, we have already initiated pre-emptive security measures such as two password authentications.

Earlier month online food delivery platforms like FreshMenu and Zomato also faced the problem of data leak in the country. Data of over 17 million Zomato users was leaked and Zomato has also notified affected customers to alter their passwords for security measures. According to reports, SBI has also leaked sensitive financial data of its account holders but SBI denied the same.

According to the report of HIBP, Bengaluru based FreshMenu suffered from data of more than 1 lakh users stolen in 2016. At Global level Yahoo, Uber, Equifax, and eBay have faced the biggest data leaks online.

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