Zendesk Security, which provides customer service software to more than 25,000 companies, announced Thursday evening Feb. 21 that its system had been breached by hackers.
Three social media networks were reported to have been compromised: Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest.
Fortunately, it doesn't seem that any users had information such as passwords stolen, but contact information may have been retrieved, including email addresses and phone numbers.
Zendesk made the announcement on a blog post simply titled, "We've been hacked."
"We've become aware that a hacker accessed our system this week. As soon as we learned of the attack, we patched the vulnerability and closed the access that the hacker had," said Zendesk's Mikkel Svane. "Our ongoing investigation indicates that the hacker had access to the support information that three of our customers store on our system."
"We believe that the hacker downloaded email addresses of users who contacted those three customers for support, as well as support email subject lines. We notified our affected customers immediately and are working with them to assist in their response."
Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest contacted affected users shortly afterward.
"Zendesk's breach did not result in the exposure of information such as Twitter account passwords," wrote Twitter in an email to users. "It may, however, have included contact information you provided when submitting a support request such as an email, phone number or Twitter username."
The security breach is the latest in what's suddenly become a major cyber-epidemic across the country. Twitter was already hacked on another occasion this February, when 250,000 users saw their email addresses, passwords and usernames stolen.
Both Facebook and Apple have been hacked by what is thought to be the same organization, although Facebook reported no personal information stolen.
Meanwhile, large media institutions such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post all claimed to have been hacked by China.
A National Intelligence Estimate released in February found that the U.S. has been under a sustained cyberattack by China for the last five years, and the government is attempting to find new ways to defend itself. A secret legal review has granted the president the power to issue pre-emptive cyberattacks, and President Obama has signed an executive order intended to help protect the nation's computer networks.
The Pentagon also plans to boost its Cyber Command division from a paltry 900 people to a more robust 4,900.
