Pakistani music streaming website Patari has been hacked, compromising the personal data and credentials of more than 257,000 people. The database containing the personal information of these users has been leaked online on English and Russian hacker forums.
It is uncertain when the data breach happened, but the information was dumped online on June 13th, 2021.
The report comes from the tech blog HackRead, which details the recent data breach on Patari. As per the report, the leaked database contained the following information:
- Full names/Usernames
- Email addresses
- Password hashes (unsalted md5)
- Playlists
- Avatar links
The hackers managed to catch Patari when they were exposing their database backup on a misconfigured MongoDB database back in May this year. Patari was informed of the misconfiguration in their database, but since the company did not respond, the hackers leaked all the information online.
An independent cyber analyst, Zaki Khalid, while commenting on the incident, told Propakistani that
While the negligence lies squarely on Patari, and its silence is deeply disturbing, the broader issue is the legislative lag by parliamentarians. The draft Personal Data Protection Act was put up for review in 2018 and after 3 years, its status remains unknown. As recently as April 2021, MoIT kept insisting it is going through a consultative process.
“Unless the Senate and National Assembly prioritize data security of citizens, we cannot expect seriousness from any of the breached entities,” he noted.
HackRead also tried to inform Patarai of the data breach via emails and Twitter, but the company did not respond.
For those who have an account on Patari.com, we recommend changing your emails and passwords immediately. You can also head over to Have I Been Pwned to check if your emails or phone numbers were compromised.
That being said, Patari users are currently on their own since the company has failed to respond for more than 10 days.
