Spade Technology: Blog
How Being Healthy Can Ruin Your Life
Do you have a device or app that you enter personal information in so you can track what you eat, what you do for exercise, how much you weigh, where you live, and when you leave your home every day to go workout? Well, if you use MyFitnessPal you may be 1 of 150 million users whose data may have been compromised.
Baltimore’s Under Armour announced Thursday evening (March 29th), that they experienced a data breach exposing usernames, email addresses, and hashed passwords of 150 million users of the popular MyFitnessPal app:
“Under Armour is working with leading data security firms to assist in its investigation, and is also coordinating with law enforcement authorities,” the company said in a statement. “The investigation indicates that the affected information included usernames, email addresses, and hashed passwords — the majority used the hashing function called bcrypt used to secure passwords.”
Under Armour will require all users to change their passwords and is “urging users to do so immediately.” They are also encouraging their users to keep an eye out for suspicious activity within their accounts.
What should you do?
If you receive an email that claims your personal MyFitnessPal information has been hacked, and that you need to click on links to change your password or open attachments to find out how to protect yourself, be very careful:
- Don’t click on links,
- Don’t open attachments, and
- If there’s a reference to a website with more information, type the web address into your browser. Don’t click the link.
Most importantly, change your password not only in your MyFitnessPal application but anywhere else you use that password or even a variation of that password.
Don’t let your quest to live a healthier lifestyle be the opening for a hacker to ruin your life.
The Lesson You Should Learn From This
That is how hackers get by all the expensive security that banks and financial institutions have; by getting your password from a less secure source!
