Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr have all warned their users that some of their data might be compromised after a security breach at Zendesk, a company which provides customer support services for all three companies.

In a blog post titled "We've been hacked," Zendesk explains that a hacker has accessed their systems and probably downloaded user info from Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest users.

"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. 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," wrote Zendesk's Mikkel Svane in the blog post.

All three companies promptly sent a notice to users, explaining the nature of the data breach.

"Twitter – along with a number of other companies – uses a customer support portal called Zendesk. Zendesk recently blogged about a significant security breach. In order to ensure those who may be impacted by this breach are notified as quickly as possible, we are sending this notification to all email addresses, including this one, that we believe could have been involved. Zendesk’s breach did not result in the exposure of information such as Twitter account passwords. It may, however, have included contact information you provided when submitting a support request such as an email, phone number, or Twitter username," wrote Twitter in a message.

Pinterest and Tumblr sent similar e-mails to their users as well.

"For the last 2.5 years, we’ve used a popular service called Zendesk to store, organize, and answer emails to Tumblr Support. We’ve learned that a security breach at Zendesk has affected Tumblr and two other companies. We are sending this notification to all email addresses that we believe may have been affected by this breach.This has potentially exposed records of subject lines and, in some cases, email addresses of messages sent to Tumblr Support," wrote Tumblr.

Tumblr also advises that users review their correspondence with the following Tumblr support addresses: support@tumblr.com, abuse@tumblr.com, dmca@tumblr.com,legal@tumblr.com, enquiries@tumblr.com, or lawenforcement@tumblr.com.

"We’re sending you this email because we received or answered a message from you using Zendesk. Unfortunately your name, email address and subject line of your message were improperly accessed during their security breach," wrote Pinterest in its e-mail to users.

It seems no passwords have been compromised in the hack on any of the three service. However, as always, users are advised to use strong passwords, use different passwords for different services and never to reveal their passwords to third parties.


























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