Robinhood hacked: over seven million users are affected

Robinhood, the popular and controversial investment app that has made a lot of talk over the last few months, not always in a positive way, announced that it had suffered a breach of the security of its data. The event would have occurred in the past3th November and the cyber attack allowed attackers access to personal information relating to no fewer than seven million users of the platform.
But how did an episode happen that is destined to revive the discussion on online data security in a big way? Let's take a closer look at the sequence of events, at least as they were justified by Robinhood.

Robinhood's post related to data hacking

It was the company that published a post on its blog, to try to explain and justify what happened. According to Robinhood, the attackers were able to gain access to customer support using a social engineering technique.
Only when the hackers had obtained a large amount of information about the app's clientele would it be possible to end the threat.
Also on behalf of the company came the comment of Caleb Sima, its Chief Security Officer, who stated that since Robinhood is a company that looks to security as a primary value, at this moment it is absolutely necessary to inform its community of what has happened.

The result of the raid

The result of the raid carried out by the hackers is indeed remarkable. The investigations carried out by Robinhood have in fact clarified that the attackers managed to obtain around five million e-mail addresses belonging to its clients. To which must be added the compromise of another two million full names of users of the platform.
In the case of 310 moreover, the damage was even more significant, since in addition to names and e-mail addresses, dates of birth and postal codes were also accessible. Ten of them have already received a report with in-depth details of what happened.
As a partial consolation, the company nevertheless pointed out that the hackers were unable to access the bank account details, debit and credit card information of the users involved. None of which, however, reported financial losses at the end of the raid.

Now the hackers are demanding a ransom

At the end of the containment phase of the raid, the attackers then proceeded to forward one ransom note. Request that was rejected by Robinhood, whose top management has taken steps to inform the competent public security authorities in order to better assess the behavior to be adopted on the matter. The company also got in touch with Mandiant, one of the leading IT security companies, to put a definitive remedy to the incident. All while investigations into the attack are still ongoing.

For Robinhood it is not the first such attack

For Robinhood this is not the first attack by hacking. In fact, in mid-October last year, the trading app was hit by a smaller analogue. At the time they had barely been 2mila platform customers affected by information stealing.
The final outcome, however, had been very painful for them, victims of the subtraction of the funds deposited on the accounts offered by the company. The fear, of course, is that hackers may return to strike in the near future. It therefore remains to understand what the leaders of Robinhood intend to do now to avoid the repetition of these episodes.