Food Ordering Service Zomato Announces Bug Bounty After Breach

After 17 million user accounts for the restaurant ordering service Zomato appeared for sale on the dark web, the company decided to work with the hacker and launch a bug bounty program.

“The hacker has been very cooperative with us,” the Zomato blog said. “He/she wanted us to acknowledge security vulnerabilities in our system and work with the ethical hacker community to plug the gaps. His/her key request was that we run a healthy bug bounty program for security researchers.”

The hacker nabbed 17 million user accounts, including names, usernames, user IDs, email addresses and password hashes with salt, which are difficult to convert into plain text. Zomato confirmed the breach May 18 and said no payment information was compromised. Users who reuse passwords should change them, the company said.

Zomato also announced it will begin a bug bounty program with HackerOne “very soon.” Over the last year, HackerOne has set up bug bounties for several federal agencies, including the Defense Department, individual military services and the General Services Administration.