Alcohol delivery startup Drizly has suffered a major breach of customer data, with nearly 2.5 million accounts compromised in an incident discovered earlier this month.
The firm — which describes itself as the world’s largest marketplace for beers, wines and spirits — partners with retail stores in over 100 North American cities.
It has been emailing customers to warn them of a recent incident in which personally identifiable information (PII) but no financial data was compromised.
“We recently identified some suspicious activity involving customer data and initiated an investigation to determine what may have occurred,” the notice read.
“We’ve found that an unauthorized party appears to have obtained some of our customers’ personal information, including email address, date of birth, hashed passwords and in some rare cases, delivery address.”
The firm went on to say that as the passwords were hashed, these credentials “cannot be used to gain access to our customers’ accounts.”
According to breach notification site HaveIBeenPwned, the algorithm used by Drizly is bcrypt. Whilst one of the more secure ones, it does not guarantee that passwords won’t be cracked.
Users would therefore be recommended to follow Drizly’s advice and reset their passwords on this site and any others they may have shared the same log-ins across.
The trove of compromised information also included customer names and IP addresses, with an estimated 2.5 million accounts affected in the July 2 breach, according to HaveIBeenPwned.
“When you have a startup that’s really rockin’ it in terms of sales and growth, they definitely become a target for bad actors,” argued Chloé Messdagh, VP of strategy at Point3 Security.
“Many times, startups don’t have the most put-together security team, if any team at all. It’s important, however, for companies to invest in security from the get-go. Without security, you’re bound to have issues – it’s not ‘if,’ but ‘when.’”