WeHeartIt

In November 2013 the image based social network We Heart It suffered a significant data breach that remained undetected for nearly four years until October 2017. The incident involved the exposure of approximately 8.6 million user records. The compromised data included usernames and email addresses along with hashed passwords. Technical analysis revealed that around 80 percent of the passwords used the SHA-256 algorithm with salt while the remaining 20 percent were stored using the weaker MD5 algorithm without salt making them highly vulnerable to decryption. The breach likely occurred due to security vulnerabilities in the systems holding user credentials at the time.