Cinema Chain Ster-Kinekor Hacked In South Africa's Biggest Data Breach

Ster-Kinekor

Ster-Kinekor

South Africa has joined the world’s massive data breaches when the country’s largest cinema chain, Ster-Kinekor, had its website hacked in 2016 exposing over 6-million  accounts. This is thought to be South Africa’s largest data breach.

Security website Haveibeenpwned.com reported the breach this week, which occurred in 2016, in an email that alerted registered users if their email addresses have been compromised, including mine.

“In 2016, the South African cinema company Ster-Kinekor had a security flaw which leaked a large amount of customer data via an enumeration vulnerability in the API of their old website,” according to an email from Haveibeenpwned.com on 13 March. “Whilst more than 6-million accounts were leaked by the flaw, the exposed data only contained 1.6-million unique email addresses. The data also included extensive personal information such as names, addresses, birthdates, genders and plain text passwords.”

News of this South African hack comes as the United States authorities this week indicted two Russian intelligence officers for the 2014 hack into 500-million Yahoo accounts.

Details including “dates of birth, email addresses, genders, names, passwords, phone numbers, physical addresses, [and] spoken languages” were compromised, according to Haveibeenpwned.com. Some 1,619,544 email addresses were also revealed.

On its website the company describes itself as: “”Ster-Kinekor Theatres is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Primedia Group and is acknowledged as one of the jewels in the group’s crown, particularly in financial terms, with attendances increasing annually despite the recessionary environment – attesting to the belief that going to the movies is a perfect way to escape the pressures of daily life, even if just for a few hours”.

It adds: “To most South Africans, the word ‘movies’ is synonymous with the name ‘Ster-Kinekor’; the biggest movie exhibitor by far (more than double the size of it’s [sic] nearest competitor), Ster-Kinekor owns some 60-65% of the market, boasting some 54 movie complexes in South Africa (more than 400 screens and 63 000 seats) with 58 state-of-the-art 3D cinemas, giving Ster-Kinekor the largest 3D footprint in this territory, as well as 4 complexes in neighbouring territories.”

Numerous phone calls to Ster-Kinekor’s head office, including to the CEO’s office, were put through to voicemail.