According to The Hollywood Reporter, the wildly popular digital media and streaming company Roku has been affected by data breach, compromising over 15,000 customer accounts. Roku, which has a whopping 80 million active accounts, announced the breach in some filings done with the state attorney generals in California and Maine last Friday.
The filings show that 15,363 accounts were compromised from December 28, 2023 until February 21, 2024. The Hollywood Reporter notes that the hackers did not break into Roku’s system but were able to get login data from various different sources.
A spokesperson from Roku sat down with The Hollywood Reporter and said, “Roku’s security team recently detected suspicious activity that indicated a limited number of Roku accounts were accessed by unauthorized actors using login credentials obtained from third-party sources (e.g., through data breaches of third-party services that are not related to Roku). In response, we took immediate steps to secure these accounts and are notifying affected customers. Roku is committed to maintaining our customers’ privacy and security, and we take this incident very seriously.”
The Hollywood Reporter also notes that the streaming company mailed a letter to the affected accounts and stated that the hackers, “in a limited number of cases,” utilized accounts to try to buy streaming subscriptions.
The letter continued to say, “Unauthorized actors separately obtained, from third-party sources that are unrelated to Roku, login information (combinations of sign-in email addresses and passwords) that they then used to access certain individual Roku accounts. However, access to the affected Roku accounts did not provide the unauthorized actors with access to social security numbers, full payment account numbers, dates of birth, or other similar sensitive personal information requiring notification.”
Initially reported by Bleeping Computer, they claimed that hackers were selling stolen login credentials for as low as $0.50 each in order to buy various hardware items.