Opera’s Password Sync Service Compromised

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Breach could affect more than  1.7 million users

Opera Software has reported a security breach that compromised Opera Sync Service, the password manager for the Opera web browser. Opera has more than 350 million users and approximate 1.7 million people are using Opera Sync Service.

To its credit, Opera Software acted swiftly and notified its users of the breach by email. The company said in the blog post, “although we only store encrypted (for synchronized passwords) or hashed and salted (for authentication) passwords in this system, we have reset all the Opera Sync account passwords as a precaution.”

Opera Sync users are also advised to change the passwords of third party services, such as email, that they used on the browser, because this information might have been stored on the Opera cloud and therefore could have been compromised.

Password managers are used by web browsers to make it easy for users to store usernames, account information, and passwords on the cloud. All major browsers, including Google Chrome, Firefox, and Apple Safari offer such features. However, unlike Chrome and Safari, Opera Sync doesn’t offer the additional security of two-factor authentication.

08/31/2016

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