Living Social Hacked: What Was Stolen?

Living Social, the online deals website partially owned by Amazon.com, was hacked on Friday because of a 'massive cyberattack,' according to company officials.

The Washington D.C.-based company announced that the attack has impacted up to 50 million customers in its database, whose names, emails, and dates of birth were stolen. Encrypted passwords were also swiped; however, those will appear as "hashed," so no plain-text passwords were stolen. Nonetheless, users will be prompted immediately to change their passwords.

Thankfully, credit card, financial and banking information for individual consumers and businesses are safe, despite the fact that the "unauthorized access" to servers impacted Living Social customers in every country the company does business except for customers in Korea, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines. 

This is the most recent attack on a major Internet service, with companies as diverse as Zappos, Evernote, and LinkedIn recently suffering from intrusions. Living Social and other daily deal websites have been struggling to stay profitable with ever-increasing cannibalization from copycat services. Living Social itself posted a $50 million loss last quarter.

This attack also comes right after Amazon led a $56 million investment round earlier this week.

AllThingsD.com obtained an email sent out to company employees about the attack giving directions to employees on prioritizing customer service in anticipation of high call volumes because of the hack: