Flight tracking services Flightradar24, which shows real-time aircraft flight information on a map, has suffered a massive data breach that may have compromised email addresses and hashed passwords for more than 230,000 customers.
"The security breach may have compromised the email addresses and hashed passwords for a small subset of Flightradar24 users (those who registered prior to March 16, 2016). While we do not have any indication that your information was accessed, we still want to sincerely apologise for the breach and let you know what we're doing, and what we encourage you to do," Flightradar24 said in a statement.
"We do not store passwords in plain text on our servers. Instead we convert them into scrambled strings of characters (hashes) that are designed to be impossible to convert back. However, as a general precaution and because the hashing algorithm used in this retired part of our system no longer is considered sufficiently secure, we have decided to reset the passwords of all potentially affected users," the firm added.