San Francisco, January 15: Software company CircleCi, whose products are popular with developers and software engineers, has confirmed that some customers' data were stolen in a data breach last month.

Although the employee's access was secured with two-factor authentication, the company said that the intruder gained access through a laptop that was infected with malware, reports TechCrunch. This vulnerable system allowed the theft of session tokens, which were used to keep the employee logged in to specific applications. Data Breach Warning: Hackers Exploiting ChatGPT To Write Malicious Codes To Steal Your Data.

The company accepted responsibility for the breach, labelling it a "systems failure" and added that its antivirus software failed to find the malware on the employee's laptop that was stealing tokens.

According to CircleCi, the theft of the session token allowed the hackers to use the employee's identity to access some of the company's production systems, which include customer data. Twitter Data Breach: E-Mails, Phone Numbers of 400 Million Users, Including High-Profile Accounts, Up for Sale on Dark Web, Hacker Makes Offer to Elon Musk.

"Because the targeted employee had privileges to generate production access tokens as part of the employee's regular duties, the unauthorised third party was able to access and exfiltrate data from a subset of databases and stores, including customer environment variables, tokens and keys," said Rob Zuber, chief technology officer, CircleCi. "We encourage customers who have yet to take action to do so in order to prevent unauthorised access to third-party systems and stores," Zuber added.

Moreover, he said that the hackers had access from December 16 through January 4. Several customers have already informed the company of unauthorised access to their systems, Zuber added.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Jan 15, 2023 06:10 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).