Magazine-style news service Flipboard is notifying users of a months-long security vulnerability, which may have exposed account data to hackers.
Between June 2, 2018 and April 22 this year databases were hit by "unauthorized access," Flipboard said in an email to customers. The hackers may have "potentially" stolen information such as names, email addresses, and passwords, although the passwords were reportedly salted and hashed rather than saved in plain text.
Some users may have had Twitter and Facebook tokens exposed if they linked Flipboard with those services.
The company didn't say how many people may have been impacted. As a safeguard however it's notifying police, deleting any third-party tokens, and resetting all passwords, which may suggest widescale impact.
Flipboard was one of the first to seize on the potential of the iPad, and indeed for a long time the app was iPad-only. Although it now faces competition from a variety of sources, Apple News among them, Flipboard remains relatively unique in transforming RSS feeds into magazines, complete with graphics-heavy formatting and even "sections."
In 2018 CEO Mike McCue criticized Apple News for being limited and a "closed ecosystem," though Apple's service has evolved considerably since then.