ALERT! Internet movie and television enthusiasts, who have been using the PLEX media servers and the PLEX forums for their daily dose of entertainment, it's time to check in your private credentials. PLEX, an online movie and TV library forum has announced that their servers have been hacked on the morning of 2nd July, 2015; which has left registered email addresses, user ids and passwords vulnerable.
The company has clarified that only the accounts that have been used for accessing the services of PLEX forums have been compromised. Yet, it added that the accounts that were created through social media hyperlinks and were never used to access the forums are most probably vulnerable to data breach. The company has however stated that their has been no breach of credit card information as it is never stored in the servers.
The company after finding about the attack, sent an email to the users, requesting them to reset their passwords. The email sent by the company follows :
Dear Plex User,
Sadly, we became aware this afternoon that the server which hosts our forums and blog was compromised. We are still investigating, but as far as we know, the attacker only gained access to these parts of our systems. Rest assured that credit card and other payment data are not stored on our servers at all.
If you are receiving this email, you have a forum account which is linked to a plex.tv account. The attacker was able to gain access to IP addresses, private messages, email addresses and encrypted forum passwords (in technical terms, they are hashed and salted). Despite the password encryption measures, we take your privacy and security very seriously, so as a precaution, we’re requiring that you change your password.
Be sure to choose a strong password, never share it, and never re-use passwords for different accounts! Even better, use a password manager (1Password, for example) to manage a unique password for you. Access to your Plex account will be blocked until you do so.
Please follow this link to choose a new password.
We’re sorry for the inconvenience, but both your privacy and security are very important to us and we’d rather be safe than sorry!
We will post more detailed information on our blog shortly. Thanks for using Plex!
Now the question arises whether the company can strengthen the security of its servers and continue providing the services without putting the privacy of its users at stake?
