Opera’s cloud sync servers have been hacked and the company has now advised its users to immediately change their passwords.
In a blog post Opera said: “Earlier this week, we detected signs of an attack where access was gained to the Opera sync system. This attack was quickly blocked. Our investigations are ongoing, but we believe some data, including some of our sync users’ passwords and account information, such as login names, may have been compromised”.
Opera has 350 million users of which 1.7 million users access its cloud sync facility who are now at risk following the breach.
“The total active number of users of Opera sync in the last month is 1.7 million, less than 0.5% of the total Opera user base of 350 million people. The remaining Opera Browser users who do not use Opera sync, do not need to take any actions,” Opera said in the blog post.
However, one might note that though Opera stores third party information such as passwords in an encrypted form, this hack can give access to those passwords as passwords can be decrypted by potential hackers.
“Although we only store encrypted (for synchronized passwords) or hashed and salted (for authentication) passwords in this system, we have reset all the Opera sync account passwords as a precaution,” the blog further added.
Also, the company has sent out emails to all the users who use this service asking them to reset any passwords to third party websites and also reset the Opera sync password. Post this, Opera has apologized for the mishap and has claimed that thorough investigations are going on.