Australian-owned global online design giant Canva, a partner of Melbourne printer PMI, has advised users to change their passwords after a weekend cyber-attack stole data of an estimated 139 million users.
The attack was first reported by tech news website ZDNet after a hacker using the name GnosticPlayers contacted a reporter to reveal they had downloaded Canva users' details up to May 17, before being detected and shut out of the site. No credit card details were stolen.
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| Canva's Melanie Perkins and Cliff Orbecht |
The incident came days after the company’s value was estimated at $US2.5 billion ($A3.6 billion) after it raised $70m in funding. Co-founders Melanie Perkins and Cliff Orbecht are said to be worth over $500 million.
Canva said it first became aware of the incident on May 24thand had reported the matter to the FBI and other authorities.
"We’re aware that a number of our community’s usernames and email addresses have been accessed,” Canva said on its website. “The hackers also obtained passwords in their encrypted form (for technical people – all passwords were salted and hashed with bcrypt). This means that our user passwords remain unreadable by external parties. There have been no indications that any user designs have been accessed.”
The company advised users to change their passwords as a precautionary measure.
"We are working with a forensics team that specializes in these types of attacks and the FBI to diagnose exactly what happened and are putting processes in place to help prevent another attack. We are committed to protecting the data and privacy of all of our users and will be implementing every possible safeguard to ensure this doesn’t happen again."
Canva offers a drag-and-drop interface that provides access to millions of photographs, graphics, and fonts for everything from posters to business cards.
Melbourne printer PMI partnered with Sydney-based Canva in 2017 to launch a new print and delivery service in Australia called Canva Print. PMI, based at Fitzroy and established in 1998, is one of Australia’s top HP sites, running five HP Indigo presses as well as a number of HP wide format machines.
Canva has a similar partnership with US print giant RPI Print.
