Atlassian HipChat group chat service hacked, change your password now!

Atlassian announced that unknown hackers broke into a cloud server of the company and accessed a huge amount of data of its group chat service HipChat.

On Monday, Atlassian reset user passwords for its group chat service HipChat after it notified its customers of a data breach. Unknown hackers broke into a cloud server of the company and stole a huge amount of data, including group chat logs.

According to Atlassian, attackers exploited a vulnerability in a “popular third-party” software library used by its HipChat.com service, the company did not reveal the name of the library.

“This weekend our Security Intelligence Team detected a security incident affecting a server in the HipChat Cloud web tier. The incident involved a vulnerability in a popular third-party library used by HipChat.com. We have found no evidence of other Atlassian systems or products being affected.” reads the security notice published by Atlassian.

“As a precaution, we have invalidated passwords on all HipChat-connected user accounts and sent those users instructions on how to reset their password.”

Hackers accessed user account data, including names, hashed passwords, and email addresses, according to the company, no financial data has been exposed.

According to the company, hackers may have stolen metadata from HipChat “rooms” or groups, this information could be used to extract information that’s not intended to be public.

Attackers may also have stolen messages and content in chat rooms for about 0.05 percent of the instances.

“For the vast majority of instances (more than 99.95%), we have found no evidence that messages or content in rooms have been accessed.” continues the data breach notification.

The company excluded that other systems of products (i.e. Jira, Confluence, or Trello) have been affected.

The good news for the users is that hacked service uses the bcrypt cryptographic algorithm for password hashing, and this system is hard to crack.

The company is already working to fix the security vulnerability in the third-party library exploited by hackers, it is preparing an update for HipChat Server that will be shared with customers directly through the standard update channel.

Atlassian has also isolated the affected systems while actively working with law enforcement on the investigation of this hack.

If you are a HipChat user, change your password and be vigilant of Phishing messages.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – HipChat , data breach)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.