BeatStars discloses security breach in Twitter live stream
BeatStars, a marketplace for selling music production beats, has disclosed a security breach today. In a Periscope live stream shared on Twitter, Abe Batshon, BeatStars CEO revealed that the mysterious cause of the site's downtime on Monday was an unauthorized access of its servers.
Security
"Last night we've seen very unusual behavior with someone trying to enter into our servers, trying to access the database, trying to run code," Batshon said during the live stream on Tuesday, December 4.
"This was very alarming to us, and I commend our engineering team for literally working for the past 24 hours trying to find what was really happening," he added.
The BeatStars CEO said his team continues to investigate the incident and they've notified authorities. He also promised an update on what the hacker had accessed.
Right now, based on screenshots of the BeatStars website shared online, the incident resulted in a mass-defacement of the site.
Batshon confirmed the screenshots of the site's defacement during the live stream.
"Right now we're very confident what was the motive of this attack," he said. "[The attacker was] trying to mass delete and mass alter the content and the database, which we were able to prevent."
The BeatStars CEO said no user content was lost following the hack. He also added that financial data was not compromised, as the site didn't store payment details. It's currently unclear if the hacker accessed users' personal records.
"We have a couple of hunches on who it might be," Bashton said about the hacker.
BeatStars did not respond for a request for additional info on its investigation ZDNet sent before this article's publication.
The BeatStars marketplace, which is still in beta development, is back online today. The service has gained a lot of positive media coverage after many hip-hop artists have released songs using beats and instrumentals bought from the site [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].
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