Spotify has been forced to issue a password reset for users after admitting that their information was exposed to some of the firm’s third-party business partners.
The music streaming giant said in a customer data breach notification sent to the California attorney general that the privacy snafu was only discovered and fixed after seven months.
“On Thursday November 12, Spotify discovered a vulnerability in our system that inadvertently exposed your Spotify account registration information, which may have included email address, your preferred display name, password, gender, and date of birth only to certain business partners of Spotify,” it explained.
“Spotify did not make this information publicly accessible. We estimate that this vulnerability existed as of April 9, 2020 until we discovered it on November 12, 2020, when we took immediate steps to correct it.”
Spotify said it has contacted all of those partners to ensure they delete the exposed customer information, and has reset the passwords of affected users.
“We have no reason to believe that any unauthorized use of your information has or will occur, however, we urge you to change the passwords of all other online accounts for which you use the same email address and password,” it added.
This is the third security incident affecting the firm in recent months. A few days ago a hacktivist calling themselves ‘Daniel’ hijacked the Spotify for Artists page, posting messages in support of Taylor Swift and Donald Trump.
A few days before that, in late November, security researchers discovered a leaky cloud database containing logins for up to 350,000 Spotify users likely to have been part of a credential stuffing campaign.
Laurence Pitt, technical security lead at Juniper Networks, urged internet users to use a password manager to help them store strong, unique credentials for each online account.
“Many people pay for premium Spotify services and with access to a password, anyone would be able to redirect a subscription for their own use,” he added.
“Password re-use is dangerous because if any of the data from this exposure does fall into the wrong hands, then it will end up in brute-force attack databases providing valid username/password combinations for access to other services.”