Coffee Meets Bagel , a dating platform that claims to be aimed at users looking for a serious relationship rather than casual dates, has confirmed that it has been the victim of a hacking attack . Hackers breached the company's systems and deleted data. The attack had led to the platform being down a few days ago.
Stopping operation
Last week, Coffee Meets Bagel (CMB) suffered an outage that affected all users. Many began complaining that they were unable to coordinate their scheduled appointments and communicate with their matches.
The platform has now confirmed that these problems were caused by a breach of its systems and the deletion of company data by a hacker. As a result, production servers were no longer functioning properly.
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“ We determined that the outage was the result of an external factor that deleted company data and files ,” Coffee Meets Bagel says
“We quickly created a secure environment for our IT team to restore our services and notified law enforcement of this incident,” he says.
At this time, Coffee Meets Bagel has not confirmed whether the attack was ransomware or whether the attackers simply deleted the company's data to disrupt the service.
The dating platform resumed operations on September 3rd, with the company extending chats by seven days and subscriptions by 14 days. Essentially, the platform is offering some perks to apologize for the inconvenience caused to users during the outage. For those who joined two weeks before the outage, CMB is also giving away 1,000 free beans (to subscribers).
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All users who sent a Discover Like or flowers to their matches on August 27th will receive an additional item on their profile.
CMB also states that all users were affected by this platform outage. Therefore, there will be no misunderstanding between people who were chatting (e.g. about ghosting).
Coffee Meets Bagel warns that all users should log back into the system, as they were all automatically logged out at the time of the attack.
It's worth noting that this isn't the first time Coffee Meets Bagel has been the victim of a hacking attack. In 2019, on Valentine's Day, the platform confirmed a data breach that exposed email addresses and names.
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The hacking attack is undoubtedly a serious challenge for Coffee Meets Bagel, demonstrating how vulnerable all companies are to hackers. The company has taken action to address the consequences of the attack, focusing on restoring services and restoring user trust. However, it is critical, at this point, that improvements be made to the application's security systems to prevent further breaches in the future.
Source: www.bleepingcomputer.com
