150 million MyFitnessPal accounts were hacked in biggest data breach this year

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About 150 million MyFitnessPal user accounts were hacked in February of this year, Under Armour has confirmed, though the company says it only became aware of the breach earlier this week.

Under Armour says that an unauthorized party breached accounts in late February, obtaining access to usernames, passwords and email addresses. Luckily that data doesn't include bank or social security information, but email addresses are often sold on to spammers.

It's the biggest data breach so far this year, casting a wider net than the Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal, which saw 50 million Facebook accounts accessed. In a statement Under Armour said it is "working with leading data security firms to assist in its investigation" as well as law enforcement authorities. Shares dropped almost 4% in after-hours trading.

Read this: 'Fit leaking' is a big privacy problem for fitness companies

The nutrition and exercise app MyFitnessPal was acquired by Under Armour in 2015, and while no hack is a good hack, it comes timed to join a growing conversation around how our personal data is handled - and what happens to that data when smaller companies are snapped up by bigger ones.

If you're a MyFitnessPal user and haven't already received the notification telling you to change your password, we recommend you do so immediately.

150 million MyFitnessPal accounts were hacked in biggest data breach this year


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Hugh Langley

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Now at Business Insider, Hugh originally joined Wareable from TechRadar where he’d been writing news, features, reviews and just about everything else you can think of for three years.

Hugh is now a correspondent at Business Insider.

Prior to Wareable, Hugh freelanced while studying, writing about bad indie bands and slightly better movies. He found his way into tech journalism at the beginning of the wearables boom, when everyone was talking about Google Glass and the Oculus Rift was merely a Kickstarter campaign - and has been fascinated ever since.

He’s particularly interested in VR and any fitness tech that will help him (eventually) get back into shape. Hugh has also written for T3, Wired, Total Film, Little White Lies and China Daily.


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