Kickstarter hacked, information stolen

If you haven't heard of Kickstarter, it's a way to fund your projects. It's the world's largest funding platform for film, music, art, theater, games, comics, design, photography, and much more. Big and small projects are brought to life through the direct support of people like you. Since its launch in 2009, 5.6 million people have pledged $982 million, funding 56,000 creative projects. Many people have launched their careers using Kickstarter.

On Wednesday night, Kickstarter said it was alerted by law enforcement officials that hackers had sought and gained unauthorized access to some of it's customers' data. They immediately closed the security breach and began strengthening security measures throughout the Kickstarter system.

"No credit card data of any kind was accessed by hackers," they reported. "There is no evidence of unauthorized activity of any kind on your account."

While no credit card data was accessed, some information about Kickstarter customers was accessed. Accessed information includes usernames, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, and encrypted passwords. Actual passwords were not revealed, however it is possible for a malicious person with enough computing power to guess and crack an encrypted password, particularly a weak or obvious one.

As a precaution, we strongly recommend that you change the password of your Kickstarter account, and other accounts where you use this password.

To change your password, log in to your account at Kickstarter.com and look for the banner at the top of the page to create a new, secure password. We recommend you do the same on other sites where you use this password. For additional help with password security, we recommend tools like 1Password and LastPass.

Kickstarter has improved it's security procedures and systems in numerous ways, and will continue to do so in the weeks and months to come. Kickstarter is working closely with law enforcement, and doing everything to prevent this from happening again. 

For any questions or concerns you can reach Kickstarter at accountsecurity@kickstarter.com.