Reddit has acknowledged that it was recently the victim of what appears to have been a fairly significant cyberattack during which the attackers stole private company information. A "sophisticated and highly-targeted phishing attack," according to Reddit's security notice
The business noted that the attackers specifically targeted Reddit, creating a fake intranet site that was nothing more than a phishing landing page intended to steal the login information and multi-factor authentication (MFA) tokens of Reddit employees.
Access to internal documents.
One victim was chosen out of an undetermined number of targets, allowing the attackers access to internal Reddit systems. They were able to access private information and Reddit's source code there.
According to Reddit's announcement, "after successfully obtaining a single employee's credentials, the attacker gained access to some internal documents, code, as well as some internal dashboards and business systems."
We have no evidence that our primary production systems, which power Reddit and house the majority of our data, have been compromised. ".
Additionally, according to the announcement, users shouldn't worry too much about the security of their accounts: "According to our preliminary investigation, Reddit user passwords and accounts are safe," it said.
Reddit stated that the victim herself informed the company's security team of the cyberattack, which is how it was discovered. Further investigation has revealed, according to BleepingComputer, that the stolen data includes contact information for business contacts as well as contacts for both current and former employees. The thieves also stole information about the advertisers for the companies.
According to the company, Reddit is still operational and the cyberattack had no impact on its performance at all. It added that it had not discovered any proof that the website's production systems had been breached by the attackers.
Who is Reedit?
A social news aggregation, content evaluation, and discussion platform based in the United States is called Reddit. Registered users also known as "Redditors" post links, text posts, images, and videos to the site, and other users then vote these submissions up or down.
Posts are arranged into user-made boards called "communities" or "subreddits" according to their subjects. When there are enough upvotes, posts that have received the most upvotes will eventually appear on the front page of the website.
The communities are moderated by Reddit staff. Additionally, moderators who are specific to a community and are not Reddit employees moderate.
Reddit is currently the 20th most popular website in the world and the 6th most popular website in the United States as of December 2022. S. in line with Semrush.
The United States accounts for 42–49.3 percent of its user base, with the United Kingdom coming in second (7.9–82 percent) and Canada coming in third (5.2–7.8 percent).
Two percent of U.S. S. adults in this age group and 14% of U.S. S. Reddit is frequently used by adults between the ages of 30 and 49.
University of Virginia roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, along with Aaron Swartz, founded Reddit in 2005. In October 2006, Condé Nast Publications purchased the website. Reddit separated from Advance Publications, the parent company of Condé Nast, in 2011.
In an investment round led by Sam Altman and involving Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Ron Conway, Snoop Dogg, and Jared Leto, Reddit raised $50 million in October 2014. The company was then valued at $500 million thanks to their investment.
Advance Publications continued to hold the majority of shares in Reddit after it raised $200 million in July 2017 for a $1.8 billion valuation. The company was valued at $3 billion after a $300 million funding round led by Tencent in February 2019.
In August 2021, a $700 million funding round led by Fidelity Investments increased that valuation to over $10 billion. The business subsequently reportedly submitted an IPO application in December 2021 with a valuation of $15 billion.
In 2005, roommates from college Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian came up with the concept and the initial design of Reddit. During their University of Virginia spring break, Huffman and Ohanian went to a Paul Graham lecture in Boston, Massachusetts.
Graham invited Huffman and Ohanian to apply to his startup incubator Y Combinator after speaking with them after the lecture. Their original concept, My Mobile Menu, which would have let users place orders for food by SMS text message, was a failure.
The concept for what Graham called the "front page of the Internet" emerged during a brainstorming session to present another startup. Huffman and Ohanian were accepted into the first class of Y Combinator because of this concept.
Using Common Lisp to code the website, Huffman and Ohanian launched Reddit in June 2005 with the help of Y Combinator funding. Embarrassed by how empty the site appeared, the founders employed a fake it until you make it strategy by creating hundreds of fictitious users for their posts.
In November 2005, Christopher Slowe joined the group as a new member. Between November 2005 and January 2006, Aaron Swartz's business Infogami merged with Reddit, and Swartz was given an equal ownership stake in the new parent company, Not A Bug. The correct description, according to Ohanian's later writing, is that Swartz's company was acquired by Reddit six months after he and Huffman founded it, not that Swartz was a co-founder.
On October 31, 2006, Huffman and Ohanian sold Reddit to Condé Nast Publications, owner of Wired, for an estimated $10 million to $20 million, and the team relocated to San Francisco. In a blog post from November 2006, Swartz criticized the new corporate environment's level of productivity while expressing his displeasure. Swartz was let go in January 2007 for unknown reasons.
In 2009, Huffman and Ohanian left Reddit. Huffman later recruited Ohanian and Slowe to his new company after co-founding Hipmunk with Adam Goldstein. Erik Martin, who joined Reddit in 2008 as a community manager and later rose to the position of general manager in 2011, contributed to the site's expansion after Huffman and Ohanian left.
According to VentureBeat, Martin was "responsible for keeping the site going" while it was owned by Condé Nast. Martin oversaw charitable initiatives and facilitated the purchase of Reddit Gifts.
2009 saw the introduction of two new Reddit advertising options. In that year, the company unveiled self-serve advertising and sponsored content. Reddit introduced its Reddit Gold benefits program in July 2010, giving editors access to new features and giving the company a new source of income independent of banner ads.
On September 6, 2011, Reddit separated from Condé Nast as a separate subsidiary of its parent company, Advance Publications. On January 18, 2012, Reddit and other websites took part in a 12-hour site-wide blackout in opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act. Reddit became a member of the Internet Defense League in May 2012, a group created to plan upcoming protests.
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