Kickstarter comes clean with hacker customer data breach update

A not-so-funny thing happened to Kickstarter this week. The crowd funding platform used by millions of people to raise funds for business, creative projects, and non-profit ventures got hacked. Kickstarter said addresses, phone numbers, user names and encrypted passwords were hit. Kickstarter said it had ended the unauthorized access to user information.

While passwords were stolen, they also were encrypted meaning it would take special skills to decipher that information. However, Kickstarter urged users to change passwords just in case as law enforcement continued to search for the hackers. The security breach was discovered Wednesday, Feb. 12.

Yancey Strickler, Kickstarter chief executive officer, put out a blog comment that credit card information was not accessed while only two user accounts had shown evidence of being affected by the stolen data. He said Kickstarter had increased security in response to the incident and was working with law enforcement to solve the crime.

Kickstarter issued a formal apology saying the company was incredibly sorry about the incident. The site added a new section of questions and answers related to the break-in. The company said it closed down the breach immediately, but waited to tell users until it had investigated the breach thoroughly.