Crowdfunding site Kickstarter hacked, user data stolen

Crowdfunding website Kickstarter has revealed that customer information has been compromised after hackers gained access to the data last week.

In a security notice published today, Kickstarter chief executive Yancey Strickler said police notified the company on Wednesday that "hackers had sought and gained unauthorised access to some of our customers' data."

While no credit card details were accessed by the hackers, Strickler said user names, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers and encrypted passwords had been compromised.

Strickler did not detail how many users were affected or how the breach took place, but said the company had found "unauthorised activity" on two Kickstarter accounts as a result.

Kickstarter has been active since 2009 and is available for Australian and New Zealand users. It has so far raised US$981 million (A$1.1 billion) in crowd funding for different projects.

The money has come from over 5.6 million backers for 133,273 projects, according to Kickstarter's most recently published set of statistics.

Strickler said the incident was "frustrating and upsetting" for a company that set a "very high bar" for how it serves its customers.

"We have since improved our security procedures and systems in numerous ways, and we will continue to do so in the weeks and months to come. We are working closely with law enforcement, and we are doing everything in our power to prevent this from happening again," Strickler said.

Strickler recommended Kickstarter users change and strengthen their site passwords.

Kickstarter visitors who have used their Facebook login credentials for the site were not compromised, Strickler said.