You might say it was the best of breach notification times and the worst of breach notification times.
While Uber customers feel like they were taken for a ride by a hushed hack that may have involved their personal information, one of the top 100 websites in the world, Imgur, made users feel like the company cared about their information being compromised with a breach notification that took just over 25 hours.
Security researcher Troy Hunt—who runs haveibeenpwned.com—discovered the breach, believed to impact 1.7 million users. He expressed praise for the company's response:
Imgur is an image sharing website where users share the images they love the most. It becomes a barometer for what is trending and viral on the web, visually speaking.
Hunt notified the company on Thanksgiving Day that he'd been contacted with details of a previously unknown hack at Imgur, and the company immediately went to work.
"On the afternoon of November 23rd, an email was sent to Imgur by a security researcher who frequently deals with data breaches.
He believed he was sent data that included information of Imgur users.
Our Chief Operating Officer received the email late night on November 23rd and immediately corresponded with the researcher to learn more about the potential breach.
He simultaneously notified Imgur’s Founder/CEO and Vice President of Engineering. Our Vice President of Engineering then arranged to securely receive the data from the researcher and began working to validate that the data belonged to Imgur users."
The breach at Imgur was an old one, apparently from 2014, and the company will have to answer questions about how it went undiscovered until user names and cracked passwords surfaced just now.
But the very fact that the company verified information from a security researcher on Thanksgiving Day and began notifying users the very next day is impressive.