Disqus, a company that builds and provides a web-based comment plugin for news websites, said Friday that hackers stole more than 17.5 million email addresses in a data breach in July 2012. “About a third of those accounts contained passwords, salted and hashed using the weak SHA-1 algorithm, which has largely been deprecated in recent years in favor of stronger password scramblers,” reports ZDNet. From the report: Some of the exposed user information dates back to 2007. Many of the accounts don’t have passwords because they signed up to the commenting tool using a third-party service, like Facebook or Google. The theft was only discovered this week after the database was sent to Troy Hunt, who runs data breach notification service Have I Been Pwned, who then informed Disqus of the breach. The company said in a blog post, posted less than a day after Hunt’s private disclosure, that although there was no evidence of unauthorized logins, affected users will be emailed about the breach. Users whose passwords were exposed will have their passwords force-reset. The company warned users who have used their Disqus password on other sites to change the password on those accounts.

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Source: Slashdot – Disqus Confirms Over 17.5 Million Email Addresses Were Stolen In 2012 Hack of Its Comments Tool