This week’s Reddit breach shows company’s security is (still) woefully inadequate

Popular discussion website Reddit proved this week that its security still isn’t up to snuff when it disclosed yet another security breach that was the result of an attack that successfully phished an employee’s login credentials.

In a post published Thursday, Reddit Chief Technical Officer Chris "KeyserSosa" Slowe said that after the breach of the employee account, the attacker accessed source code, internal documents, internal dashboards, business systems, and contact details for hundreds of Reddit employees. An investigation into the breach over the past few days, Slowe said, hasn’t turned up any evidence that the company’s primary production systems or that user password data was accessed.

“On late (PST) February 5, 2023, we became aware of a sophisticated phishing campaign that targeted Reddit employees,” Slowe wrote. “As in most phishing campaigns, the attacker sent out plausible-sounding prompts pointing employees to a website that cloned the behavior of our intranet gateway, in an attempt to steal credentials and second-factor tokens.”