Slack Got Hacked in February

Communication platform startup, Slack, reveals that its service was compromised by hackers in February.

Slack, a communication platform for teams, has revealed that there has been unauthorized access to a Slack database storing user profile information.

“We are very aware that our service is essential to many teams. Earning your trust through the operation of a secure service will always be our highest priority. We deeply regret this incident and apologize to you, and to everyone who relies on Slack, for the inconvenience.”

Slack was hacked in February and the security hole was open for a period of four days. Slack has informed the users that have been compromised. There was also unusual behavior on some of the accounts, despite the fact that the passwords in the user profile database are stored encrypted. Slack’s hashing function is encrypted with a randomly generated salt per-password, which makes it computationally infeasible that your password could be recreated from the hashed form.

Since the hacking, Slack has been reviewing its complete system and worked with outside experts to make sure their infrastructure is secure. This is essential to a communication platform that is used inside companies. The information stored in Slack could be very valuable for competitors.

In addition to the backend improvements, Slack is offering now Two Factor Authentication. Once users enable two-factor authentication, they will be prompted to enter a verification code in addition to your normal password whenever you sign in to Slack

Also available is a “Password Kill Switch” for team owners, which allows for both instantaneous team-wide resetting of passwords and forced termination of all user sessions for all team members (which means that everyone is signed out of your Slack team in all apps on all devices). 

Slack (previously named Tiny Speck) was co-founded in 2013 by Stewart Butterfield, who previously founded Flickr. Slack offers a real-time messaging, archiving and search functionality that facilitates better communication within a team.